Help, I think my Vera died

Community Playground General Discussions
#1

Thursday night my Vera failed to turn off my lights.

I logged into it and clicked to turn off the lights, but nothing. So I reset Vera with a power cycle, waited about 5 minutes, and could not login back it.

Played around, with it a bit and finally got back in, but could not control any devices. The dongle flashes.

So I tried to update the firmware on the box. I waited about 10 minutes for the box to reboot and tried to access it. Nothing. I waited a bit loginer and still nothing, so I rebooted. Finally, I could get back in, but still could not control anything. I tried to update one of my devices and save it, but the save failed. I rebooted one more time and could not access the system again.

At this point figured I had nothing to loose, so I relfashed the firmware on the box following this: http://wiki.micasaverde.com/index.php/Firmware_Flash.

This has not helped. I still cannot access the box.

The if I power cycle the box, it seems to come up in different stages - sometimes the power light flashes, some time it does not come on at all and othertimes it will come on solid.

A few times I have gotten it to respond to pings, but as soon as I try to access the web interface it dies.

Any thoughts? or is it dead and I need to replace it? I have had my Vera since late October

Thanks for any help anyone can provide.

BTW - I did try to contact support through the micasaverde.com site on Friday, but no one contacted me.

#2

Hi:

I have a similar problem in that the Vera is completely non responsive. What I notice also is that the dongle will flash at normal interval then there will be several very short flashes at inconsistent intervals, then return to the normal flash rate. I’m not sure if there is something external that is affecting the system, or if the dongle is bad. I have dongle ZSFS 100 US. I completely reset the Vera and the entire Zwave network. Then I reprogrammed everything from scratch. The system worked for about 2 weeks, but has gone back to this seemingly corrupt, definitely unusable state.

Here are my questions:

Are there some diagnostics I can run to tell if its the system or the dongle?
Should I check the firmware on the dongle and if so, how?
Would anyone recommend buying a spare dongle…just in case?
If I replace the dongle, can I simply do a system restore or will I have to reprogram everything?

Thanks for any feeback.

#3

Well, my problem seems to have gone away after working quite a bit with support.

It seems that my problem stemmed from the fact that I have a firewall which protects all of my computers. the firewall sits behind my AT&T Uverse router which also acts as a firewall. Both are doing NAT. On top of that, I have Vera set with a static IP.

The problem from what the support person was telling me was that Vera would detect new network settings and want to update the IP, even though it was set as static. I asked why you would try to update the network setting if I set them staticlly, to which he said, “good question”.

So, apparently they are going to try to fix that. In the mean time, I have reset my Vera and have not added any of the additional plug-ins like the mobile phone (I-phone) plug in as that is when my problems seem to have started.

Try rebooting without the internet (wan cable) pluged in and see if you can gain access again. If you can, then enable tech support before you reconnect the internet cable and give them a call. It took a couple of days and lots of expirementing, but they did work through the issue.

I do have to say at one point I was really tempted to hit it with a hammer, but it is working now.

#4

Hi,

spec486,

  1. Try to send us a trouble report from your Vera and state your issue. From the logs you will provide we can tell if it’s a dongle or system problem. Or another.
  2. The dongle sold by us are usually one of this list: http://wiki.micasaverde.com/index.php/ZWave_Dongle . You can also check to see if there’s a firmware upgrade available for your Dongle with the Part Number. See this topic: http://forum.micasaverde.com/index.php?topic=2857.0 and http://forum.micasaverde.com/index.php?topic=2859.0
  3. We don’t. We don’t find it necessary. And if indeed your dongle has issues, we will send you a new one in replacement.
  4. Before you send us the old dongle, go to Devices/Z-Wave/More Z-Wave options and backup your dongle. After the dongle backup is done, save a copy of your entire Vera’s configuration from Advanced/Backup tab. When the new one comes, hit the restore from the same tab, but check also the box to upgrade the dongle.