Diagnostics and privacy in BB-Eco
This page describes the diagnostics feature as shipped in the BB-Eco beta channel from September 2026. The wording is awaiting legal review and may change before the feature reaches the stable channel.
BB-Eco can send Brainboxes a short, anonymous report after each firmware-update attempt. The feature is off by default. It exists for one reason: firmware updates that fail in the field are hard to reproduce on a bench, and knowing which models, firmware versions and error categories fail, across many sites, is how we find and fix them.
Turning it on and off
In the app: Settings -> General -> Share anonymous firmware-update diagnostics.
From the command line: bb-eco telemetry on and bb-eco telemetry off. Both write the same
setting, so whichever you use last wins.
Turning it off deletes the installation ID and any reports that have not been sent yet. Nothing is sent afterwards.
The beta channel
On the beta channel the reports are always on and the switch is shown on and locked. Beta builds are pre-release, and these reports are how firmware-update problems are found before they reach the stable release. You agree to this when you install a beta build (the installer says so) or when you switch to the beta channel on Settings -> About, where BB-Eco asks once and remembers your answer. Switching back to the stable channel makes the reports optional again; if you had never turned them on yourself, the installation ID and any unsent reports are deleted at that point, exactly as if you had turned them off.
What a report contains
One report is sent per firmware-update attempt (a single device, a device in an
Update all batch, an automatic update, or a bb-eco upgrade run). It carries:
| Field | Example | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Outcome | Failed | Success rate per model and version |
| Device model and family | ED-588, ED | Which hardware is affected |
| Microcontroller class | Tiva | Different chips take different upgrade paths |
| Hardware variant | T, 512 KB flash, 0x100A0002 / 0x1034C06E | The firmware-type letter, flash size and the chip's TI identification codes. Some units were built with a 512 KB part instead of 1024 KB and take a different image; a problem confined to one variant is invisible without this. These are part codes shared by every unit of that type, not serial numbers |
| Firmware version before and after | 8.25 -> 8.33 | Which releases introduce or fix problems |
| How far the update got | FirmwareAppUpgrade | Whether the failure was before or after the device committed to the new image |
| Error category | ConnectionReset | A fixed list of classes, never the error text |
| Duration | 74.2 seconds | Transfer speed regressions |
| Trigger | Manual, Bulk, Auto, Cli | Which entry point was used |
| UDP pre-flight result and network type | Passed, Ethernet | Firewall and Wi-Fi related failures |
| Device identifier | 8020e4d0... (32 hex characters) | Tells repeated attempts on one device apart from attempts on many |
| BB-Eco version, release channel, operating system and CPU architecture | 0.9.0-beta.140, beta, windows 10.0.22631, x64 | Which builds are affected |
| Installation ID | a random UUID | Groups reports from one installation; used to honour deletion requests |
Three smaller report types use the same channel: a summary when an Update all batch finishes (counts only), a note when BB-Eco's recovery radar hears a device stuck in its bootloader (device identifier and model only), and a single consent record when you turn the feature on.
You can see exactly what was sent, at any time: Settings -> General -> View last report,
or bb-eco telemetry show-last. Before anything has been sent the app shows a sample built
from a placeholder device.
What a report never contains
- IP addresses, subnet masks, gateways or DNS servers
- MAC addresses
- Device names, locations or any other text you typed into a device
- Usernames, passwords or other credentials
- File paths, computer names or user account names
- Serial data, IO values or anything that passes through a device
- Log files or log excerpts
- Error message text (only the category)
Every report is checked against a deny-list before it leaves your computer. If a report matches anything that looks like an address, a path or an e-mail, the whole report is dropped and a warning is written to the local log; nothing is rewritten and sent anyway. The server applies the same checks again and refuses anything that slips through.
About the device identifier
The device identifier is a one-way hash of the device's MAC address combined with a random secret that is generated on your computer when you opt in and never sent to Brainboxes. Without that secret the identifier cannot be turned back into a MAC address, and the same device produces different identifiers on different installations. Turning diagnostics off and on again generates a new secret, so the device gets a new identifier; we cannot follow a device across that boundary, and we do not try to.
When and where reports are sent
Reports are queued on your computer and sent over HTTPS to
update.brainboxes.com/telemetry/, the same host BB-Eco already uses for software updates
and firmware downloads. If you are offline, up to 500 reports (2 MB) are kept and sent later;
older ones are discarded first. The queue is flushed shortly after BB-Eco starts, every ten
minutes while it runs, and a few seconds after each new report. Settings -> General ->
Send queued reports now sends immediately.
Reports are received by a service Brainboxes runs on Cloudflare Workers and stored in a Cloudflare D1 database located in Western Europe. Only Brainboxes engineers have access. The service accepts at most 500 reports per installation per day and refuses anything that is not a well-formed BB-Eco report.
Retention and deletion
- Reports are kept for 400 days (about 13 months) and then deleted automatically.
- To have everything your installation has sent deleted earlier, e-mail
[email protected] with the installation ID shown on
the Settings page or by
bb-eco telemetry status. The installation ID is the only key we hold for your data. If you turned diagnostics off and on again, include every ID you had.
Legal basis
Diagnostics are sent only with your consent, given by turning the feature on, and consent is withdrawn by turning it off. The installation ID and the device identifiers are pseudonymous identifiers; Brainboxes Limited is the data controller and Cloudflare, Inc. is the processor that hosts the receiving service and database. Brainboxes does not use these reports for marketing, does not share them with third parties, and does not combine them with any account, licence or sales data.
Consent versions
| Version | Introduced | Change |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | September 2026 (beta channel) | First release of the feature, as described on this page |
| 2 | September 2026 (beta channel) | The update report also carries the device's hardware variant (firmware-type letter, flash size, chip identification codes) |
BB-Eco records the consent version you agreed to. A future release that needs to send anything not listed here will introduce a new version and will not send the new data under the old consent.
For the curious
The engineering contract (report schema, the deny-list rules, the queue on disk, and the
receiving service) is documented in the BB-Eco repository's docs/telemetry.md.