Firmware that breaks stuff? Sweet! Where do I sign up?

Ohh RTI...  QC problems?  Ehh, OK.  I can deal with that.  Chalk it up to a new manufacturing process, or new plant, or RoHS lead-free solder; whatever.  Products that take longer to come to market than planned?  Yeah, again, whatever.  Vaporware is fine by me.  I'm not even going to tell a customer about something that isn't at least in stock at my local disty.  Firmware updates that break things?  That ain't cool.  (Is this a foreshadowing of C4 in my future?? :)  )



Recently RTI released version 2.1 firmware for all two-way enabled devices.  Cool!  Through the power of the interwebs, I already knew that the 2.1 XP-8 firmware makes the power sense ports not respond to anything.  Luckily.  Also, in preparing for our Open House I was trying to get an MX-980 to issue Litetouch RS232 commands by sending IR triggers to the XP-8 to execute macros.  I'm not too well versed in URC, but I have used the IR macro triggers to do some funky things before and they always worked perfectly.  Couldn't get them to work at all.  Is this another thing that 2.1 breaks?  Who knows!  Had RTI come out and at least told us that these things were bugs in the 2.1 firmware then I wouldn't have wasted 2 hours trying to get it to work.


Here was my problem.  I have a house with three Zigbee T2-C's and an XP-8.  It was my first job with multiple Zigbee remotes and multiple ZM24 antennas.  Had a TON of problems getting it set up; apparently us RTI dealers are unwitting beta testers.  I'm cool with beta testing as long as I know that's what I'm doing.  I went back out to this house and while I was there I figured I would update the remotes to 2.1 since they supposedly cleared up some Zigbee wake-up issues.  I knew I couldn't update the XP-8 because I'm using a power sense event to trigger whole house audio to come on.  Had I not known this (thanks to Remote Central) I would've loaded 2.1 into the XP-8 and probably wouldn't have tested that power sense event.  Why would I?


So I load 2.1 into the three remotes.  Goes fine.  I made a few minor changes to the programming, so I had to update the XP-8.  No go.  I get an error that the Weather driver is an old version and the XP-8 can't be updated.  Huh?  OK, well maybe I can just update the Weather driver to 1.1.  No go.  It already shows 1.1.  OK, well I can't update to 2.1... so what do I do?  I call RTI.  I had read that they had an unreleased 2.2 firmware for the XP-8.  I call and beg for it.  He tells me that yes they have one, but he's not sure he can give it to me.  He confirms that it fixes the power sense issue and mentions something about system macros, but I didn't quite catch it.  I'm assuming it's the IR macro triggers I couldn't get to work at the shop.  Well he agrees to send it to me.  Cool.  After a few hours of going back and forth with misspelled email addresses and messages stuck in spam limbo, I finally get it.  Upload it and all is well.


Or is it?  My Home Page with weather info at the bottom now has no image and the text all reads %SYS%% and a bunch of other garbled stuff.  Great.  Check the programming and now all my existing weather page variables are linked to long garbled strings of characters instead of what they are supposed to be (like Forecast 1 - Day).  No way I'm rebuilding all those pages, so I open up a version of the system file from before I got to the house that day.  Check the weather variables and they all have the same garbled info.  So I add a couple new weather pages from the page wizard... and they all have the garbled variables, too!  How in the world is that possible?  I just did a T3-V and T4 at the shop with the page wizard's weather pages and they all worked fine right out of the "box", just like they should.


I go back to my current system file and have to remove every single weather variable and re-add it.  What a pain in the a$$.  Update the remotes and they work fine.  WTF?


Obviously RTI knew about the problems because they already had a 2.2 firmware completed.  Why couldn't they at LEAST post a note on the dealer side of their web site telling us that the firmware caused a couple problems, tell us what those problems are, and tell us they're working on it and will have a fix out ASAP??  I understand not having 2.2 available on their website yet as they were probably still testing it, but why leave us in the dark like that?


On top of this crap, I was adding two IR sensors, an IR hub, and one emitter to this system.  I should have been out of this house in 90 minutes.  I had already gone over all the customer's questions, made the programming updates, and at 90 minutes in I was finished hooking up the IR sensors.  Well, after a bad IR hub and these firmware problems, I was there for over 5 hours.  My whole day was shot.  


Fun times.