Big thanks to Micasaverde. My Vera box crashed last night and I had no access to the box. I sent him a PM to see if he could call me. With-in a couple hours he called me and walked me through getting the box up and running again! These guys provide quality service!
Could post the reanimation steps here so we won’t have to bother Micasaverde if/when it happens to someone else?
Basically these were the steps we went through.
- Micasaverde sent me the Asus Rescue.exe file
- Downloaded the newest firmware revision from the posted link.
- Hooked vera directly to the PC and LAN1 on Vera.
- Went into the control panel/network connections and changed the PC address to 192.168.1.2
- Ran the Rescue.exe file and clicked browse.
- Chose the newest firmware file then let the rescue.exe do it job. When it finished restoring I was up and running.
One thing I had to do was restore my devices via my last backup.
I try to upgrade the firmware 1.04 last night, but it stops halfway and seems to be crash, i have no way to access to it now!, the vera box “on” light keep flashing at interval of 1sec when being power up, I have tried the back restore switch, but nothing happen, can someone post the asus rescue.exe file for me to try out the same way as mentioned. Thanks…
Alan - I just emailed you the file. Rename the Asus.x to Asus.zip, unzip it, and use the rescue.exe file.
Big Thanks to wseverino and micasa team for getting the feedback fast! I just done the upgrade and setting up my Z-network now!! Quick check on it!, Nice and easy to read! like the status indicator! C-configured success, P-Polling etc, Actually just found some errors, will share in other related topics, Anyway Thanks Alot!!.
Best Rgds,
just curious, in case one day I have to go through this, is there a mac version of the “rescue.exe” binary or does it mean that without a bootcamp/vmware solution, mac users are out of luck?
thanks,
-j.
BTW, the reason this happens is if the upgrade gets interrupted while it’s busy writing the flash rom. When an upgrade starts it’s important to always wait for it to say ‘upgrade finished’ before you cycle power on Vera. In the case of wseverino we were doing testing earlier on his box so it wasn’t his fault. Unfortunately, this firmware rescue is for windows-only. The openWRT site explains how to do it without the asus rescue utility by doing a tftp upload at the right moment. But it’s kind of tricky, I’ve been told.
How do you cycle Vera on and off remotely?
How do you cycle Vera on and off remotely?
By cycle power I meant remove the power. You can’t do this remotely. Upgrading the firmware remotely is safe. The problem is if you start upgrading Vera’s firmware, and before it finishes about 4 minutes later, you unplug Vera’s power while it’s still upgrading.
Is issuing ‘reboot’ command is bad idea?
reboot is the same as a power cycle. If you do it while the firmware is being written to the flash you’ll end up with a non-functional unit that won’t boot. In this case you need to put Vera in diag mode and run the ‘rescue’ utility to get it back to normal.
i seem to have somehow gotten into this situation. can someone email me the rescue.exe utility? you can send it to kris at corkandale.com
Kris - see this page http://wiki.micasaverde.com/index.php/Firmware_Flash. You can download it.
awesome, i will try this tonight. thanks.
If you are familiar with flashing any other OpenWRT devices through TFTP push, it can be done much simpler, especially for people w/o Windows, like myself… 
the rescue utility worked just fine. thanks a bunch.
Just to add a comment.
For what reason ever it took me more than 20 tries last week for the rescue procedure. So keep being patient when this does not work instantly. It will - sometimes.
For Mac users: Even with Parallels Desktop running XP and a bridged ethernet adaptor I didn’t get to Vera. So it’s good to have an old Windows notebook. Just in case…
I’m new to the Vera and Home Automation in general. I received my Vera two days ago and have had one unfortunate turn after another. I read some posts on this forum that suggested downloading a firmware update so after spending several hours and not being able to connect any of my Z-Wave devices, I upgraded to minor version 979. . After updating, I received several red error messages proclaiming that “Communication error while retrieving local database.” Now every time I click an option in Setup I get a pop-up that says “Please wait for data to load”.
Any ideas? They’re all welcome. I have a trouble ticket in, nothing yet.
I’ve seen MCV support folks ask users with that issue to submit a trouble ticket through Vera, I don’t remember where the link for that is in the interface (I think it’s under “Advanced”) and I’m not at home now. Apparently, the logs they get when you do that can help them solve the bugs that are causing it.
If you want to get up and running without that, if you you reapply the 979 firmware and select the option to go back to factory defaults, you should be fine and since you haven’t been able to add any devices, you want have lost any data. If that doesn’t work follow the reset instructions on the wiki which involve double clicking the black physical button on the back of Vera.