What's New in TinyPilot 1.5.1

TinyPilot 1.5.1 came out this week. This is a minor release that enhances the convenience of existing features and improves overall stability.

Load virtual disk drive from URL

The major new feature of TinyPilot's last release was virtual disk mounting. It allows you to upload a .iso or .img file from your client device and then present it as a removable USB drive to your target computer.

Uploading images from your client worked fine, but what if you don't already have the image locally? You have to download it from the Internet onto your client machine, then upload it from your client machine to your TinyPilot.

It felt convoluted to download a file to one device and then upload it to another, so we added a second option: download from URL.

When you specify an image URL, TinyPilot downloads the file and adds it to its virtual disk inventory. The demo below shows a user downloading the latest Ubuntu server image directly from a remote URL.

Use .local domains securely

TinyPilot uses a custom certificate authority that allows your browser to secure its connection to your TinyPilot.

When you visit https://tinypilot/, the address bar shows a lock sign, indicating that the browser authenticated the TLS connection and encrypted it end-to-end.

Before this release, the TLS security indicator only worked for the https://tinypilot/ address. If your network added suffixes for local hosts like tinypilot.local or tinypilot.localdomain, your browser would flag the connection as insecure.

In the newest release, TinyPilot's TLS certificate supports Subject Alternative Names for common local DNS suffixes:

Support for Subject Alternative Names means that you can access your device using any of the following addresses, and TLS will still work as expected:

• https://tinypilot
• https://tinypilot.local
• https://tinypilot.localdomain

Want to use a different hostname than tinypilot? No problem! You can use the System > Hostname feature to rename your device. TinyPilot will automatically update its TLS certificate to match the new name.

Bugfixes and improvements

In addition to these enhancements, TinyPilot adds several stability improvements and bugfixes:

• Adds a "reset to defaults" option to the video settings dialog and improves its UI
• Improved robustness and error detection during updates
• Fixed a bug that prevented modifier keys from registering during mouse clicks
• Improved compatibility for TinyPilot's virtual mouse feature
• Add temperature and throttling checks to TinyPilot's diagnostic script

Updating to TinyPilot 1.5.1

You can update to the latest version of TinyPilot by clicking System > Update in the navigation bar:

Don't see an update option? For older versions of TinyPilot, SSH into your device and update with the following command:

/opt/tinypilot/scripts/upgrade && sudo reboot

Users of the free, Community Edition of TinyPilot can upgrade to Pro to take advantage of the new premium features.