dongle problem

Community Playground General Discussions
1

Every day, or almost everyday, I lose control over my lights. When this happens, I go to Vera, pullout the dongle, push it back in, and it’s fixed. The only problem is I have to walk down the stairs go to the room with Vera. This isn’t easy for me, because I have Parkinson’s disease. Does anyone know of a fix for this problem. I have the most recent updates to the firmware .979?

If it’s not something, it’s something else.

2

i beleive there is a known issue with the firmware of the dongle. If I recall the blue light will stay on as a symptom (but not positive)- there’s a firmware update from the dongle manufacturer.

search the forum - I need to run literally so can’t search to find you the thread on it… sory

3

I think this is the one

[url=http://forum.micasaverde.com/index.php?topic=2857.msg11457#msg11457]http://forum.micasaverde.com/index.php?topic=2857.msg11457#msg11457[/url]

4

Be careful, I did the firmware upgrade two weeks ago and it made things worse. Before the firmware upgrade specified in the instructions by MCV, my dongle would freeze every other week, but now it freezes everyday. I’ve got support tickets in with MCV, but no resolution yet. Thinking maybe I botched the upgrade, I repeated the process and the dongle still freezes after a few hours. So far I haven’t found a way to “undo” the firmware upgrade.

Is anyone else having issues after the firmware upgrade?

5

thanks to everyone. I don’t want to make anything worse. So, I will wait for more input from other users, before I upgrade to a bigger problem.

6

I guess I’ll be staying with the old and trusty first-gen dongle, which has NEVER locked for me.

7

The new dongle firmwre fixed the lockup problems for me, I was locking up every few hours at one point. Now, with the new dongle firmware, vera has been running reliably for 2 months.

8

FWIW, I have the same problematic dongle, but after I did the dongle update, all seems to be well. I will say that after the update, the dongle blue light no longer flashes but stays solid blue while plugged in to Vera. However, it seems to be working just fine.

Caveat - I’ve only had it for a couple weeks and after some hair-pulling on setup (firmware update and dongle update), all is well. Well, almost all - still can’t get the Smartphone plugin to work.

9

I just experienced my first dongle lockup. I’ve had a good (2.78 L:1) dongle from the beginning and never had a problem with it until I upgraded to 1.1.213 (aka UI3, or as I warmly think of it “The UI from h3ll”) and then did a restore back to .980. Then I went on vacation and locked up while I was out of town. Fun times.

10

if you reboot does the dongle fix itself?

sounds like we might need a plugin that forces a reboot if it smells a dead dongle.

Homeseer (having to run on a windows os pc that we all know are sooo stable when you need them to be- lol)- has some sort of a plugin that if i recall actually worked with a “blackbox” that you plugged inbetween your pc and it’s AC outlet. If i remember correctly if homeseer didn’t ping the blackbox (becasue it locked or the windows pc locked) every so many minutes the black box killed power for a bit to reboot the pc. ahhh the joys or having to trust windows for something mission critical.

seems like vera on the asus router is a bit more stable but sometimes the dongle locks- so maybe somethign that sniffs the dongle status would be good to have?

11

Yes, I cycled the power and Vera seems to be operating normally again.

Some of the guys who have Vera in a second home, etc. have her on a plugin timer that cycles the power every so often to avoid this lockup problem. Your solution sounds like it would be a godsend.

12

i wish i had the knowledge to write such an add in. But the idea of a timer is a good one in the mean time- just have it go off in the middle of the night.

13

Ah, sounds like you need a second Vera with a spare appliance module! Connect the first Vera to the appliance module and program the second Vera to power cycle the first one periodically… ;D ;D

14

@denix: That’s an interesting idea. I could have each Vera cycle the other. For a guy like me who has sunk thousands of dollars into an unreliable system, the additional $300 doesn’t even make me blink.

Having the Living Room lights come on at 3:43 this morning for absolutely no reason, now that made me blink.

15

You know, I’m probably jinxing myself, but knock-on-wood, except for a massive failure & rebuild I had to do in the early days of my Vera, mine has been working flawlessly for over six months. I upgraded to firmware 979 as soon as it was offically released, and it’s still working perfectly.

I don’t have a terribly complex network (you can see my components in my footer below). But I count myself lucky having seen a lot of the challenges experienced by users in this forum. Overall, I couldn’t be happier with this product and the peace of mind and level of control it gives me over a home 500 miles away that I’m only at a couple times a month.

Just wanted to let some Vera newbies know that it does actually work well for some of us, albeit some of us who probably don’t fully exercise all its capabilities.

PS: I am very nervous about the new UI given some of the feedback I’ve seen in the forum. I’m typically an early adopter, but in this case, I’m going to stick with what works for a while longer.

16

I have to post that I did finally get my dongle upgraded.

MCV support was not very helpful, but they did offer to replace the dongle, which is more than satisfactory customer service IMHO. Since I had the dongle replaced last fall as part of the recall, I decided to keep trying to upgrade it as I doubted the dongle was at fault–just bad firmware upgrade procedure. On the sixth day of trying, I decided to restart from scratch. Deleted all the drivers and upgrade utilities for the dongle, and download everything fresh. This time it worked.

And the dongle freeze has not reoccured. I’m assuming my original download files were corrupted in transmission, and the delete of all parts from my system and starting from scratch cleared it up.

17

I got so tired of walking up and down the stairs to unplug and replug the dongle that I plugged my router into a module for Christmas lights with a push button remote control. now, when the dongle hangs up, I switch off the router, wait a few seconds, and turn it back on. An x-10 device should also work.