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. 

Grand Opening

Phew...  After weeks of scrambling preparations, our Grand Opening was last night.  Other than the weather SUCKING and traffic being really bad for no reason (one person who usually has a 20 minute ride took an hour and 45 minutes) it turned out great!  We had about 75 people show up, did guided tours of each room, had great food and drinks, door prizes, a cartoonist doing caricatures (on a paper with our logo and information at the bottom... sneaky...) and just a good time for all.  Now our 'builders' can see the custom stuff they never knew we did and the 'custom builders' got to see the sheer volume of work we can handle.  Nice.

So why was it stressful getting set up for this?  Here's why... I had about 2 weeks to revamp what all the equipment in each room could do.  Didn't have to hang TVs or install speakers or anything like that, but I redid the entire control system and made every source, including 3 cameras, available everywhere.  To summarize, here is what was installed when I started here back in Feb.  This was simply a design that wasn't planned out in a single vision; it was let's add this here, let's add that there, etc.  No one was in a position to step back and see what could be done.  It's not that there wasn't anyone who could pull it off, there was just no time to do it and I just don't think anyone saw how close they were to the potential that was there.


It was:
Room A
You could view one DirecTV receiver or Escient Fireball via composite video

Room B
You could view one DirecTV receiver, Bose Lifestyle, Blu-Ray, (all component video, thank god) and do some good/better/best speaker demos.  MX-980 for control.

Room C
Four-screen video wall; only displayed one DirecTV receiver full screen and played audio through 1 pair of ceiling speakers

Room D (theater)
You could view Blu-Ray, PS3, Wii, and one DirecTV receiver.  MX-810 for control.

Main racks - MRF-350 tied to everything.  MSC-400 installed in a nice RSH shelf, but wasn't hooked to anything LOL!  :)

Here's what I changed.  I have to give most of the credit to the bosses who OK'ed spending the money on the stuff I suggested.

Main Racks
Left MRF-350, pulled MSC-400 out.
Added RTI XP-8 and Zektor Clarity Elite 8x8 component video and audio matrix.  If you haven't heard of them, I HIGHLY suggest checking them out.  This piece of gear is unbelievable for what it is.  The control is incredible, performance is transparent and fast, and it does things you wouldn't even think of.  (analog/digital and digital/analog conversion, three composite/s-video to component transcoded inputs in addition to the 8 component inputs, input gain control, audio delay control, timed volume fade commands, follow-me zone control [pay attention - this one sounds confusing...  you're playing a source in one room and are about to go into the next room but want to shut the first room down.  One command fades the volume out in room 1, puts that source into room 2 and fades the volume up to the exact level where you had it.  That is ONE COMMAND.... INSIDE THE MATRIX, not in the control system!  One serial string!]) 
Much thanks to Jeff Haynes from Zektor for getting us this unit in perfect time to get it installed for our show!
http://www.zektor.com

Room A
View 4 DirecTV receivers and Escient Fireball.  Control from MX-810 (the one that used to be in the theater)

Room B
View one DirecTV receiver, Blu-Ray, and Bose Lifestyle.  Didn't change much in here since there was already so much to do with the speaker demos and all... Control still from MX-980.  Adding sources is just a programming change away...

Room C
View 4 DirecTV receivers, Blu-Ray, Escient Fireball, and 3 security cameras on any or all screens of the video wall, all independent of each other.  Ceiling speakers and new wireless headphones (two different audio zones) can play audio from any screen or video wall.  Plus that audio zone will follow if you change sources.  So the ceiling speakers aren't just playing DirecTV 3, they're playing DirecTV 3 but a tracking the Bottom Left screen.  Change the source on the Bottom Left screen and they follow suit.  Same goes for wireless headphones.  Doesn't sound like much but it took some thinking to figure out how to do it with only set flag/clear flag/test flag commands available to me.  Control is now via T4 (with 2-way feedback through Wi-Fi).  T4 is also programmed to control the theater.

Room D (theater)
In addition to the PS3 and Wii, you can now view all 4 DirecTV receivers, 3 security cameras, and control the Litetouch system in that room.  Control is now a T3-V.


All in all a fun night. Only 2 or 3 minor technical glitches and everyone seemed to walk away impressed.  That's all you can ask for, right?  Oh, and my friend won a $25 Outback giftcard as a door prize.  :)