Power Cycles on 1st Gen Rachio

We had a flurry of reports of Power Cycles on our 1st Gen Rachio last evening (7 over an 8 hour period), and only one of them was reported on other devices as an internet outage, and there were no detected power failures. (I have a Synology unit with USB connection to a UPS unit on that same circuit that reports instantaneous power losses or drops, so I’m pretty confident that power wasn’t the source.)

It seems that Rachio Power Cycle reports don’t necessarily mean that Power Loss triggered them. I’m curious if the Rachio might report Power Cycles based on an internal reboot because of a very brief loss of Internet connectivity, or if it will only do it with an extended outage. Is there a specific period of WiFi connectivity loss involved?

@vicw

Sorry for the confusion. This also can mean new firmware was delivered to your controller (which will reboot the controller when not actively watering). We released various versions of the Gen1 firmware which would have caused these events last night in your activity feed.

:cheers:

That is really interesting. That would help to explain the unusual events. Were there multiple updates issued during that period to 1st gen units?

Yes, we were actively working on upgraded Gen1 firmware.

:cheers:

The “Technical Info” screen on the iOS app shows “Firmware version N/A” for my Gen 1 Controller (8 Zones). Is this purely an app bug or do I need to worry about the hardware itself?

The way Gen1 units work is very binary. They “always” have the lastest firmware, we don’t have a choice :wink:

:cheers:

Well, binary would imply at least two choices :slight_smile: so I guess as long as it is working, I shouldn’t bother with it…

I see the same on my Android app. I understand that it is always at the latest level, but it does seems a bit odd that we can’t confirm what the level is on the device via the apps.

Ha, if the controller is online it will always have the latest firmware. For Gen1 it is all or nothing when we deploy firmware. If offline it won’t have the latest firmware :wink:

:cheers:

Does that mean it actually boots an image hosted on the network every time it is powered on?

I’m curious - are things different on the Gen2 and Gen3? Do users get prompted to choose when/if they want to download newer firmware?

For Gen 1 a lot of the heavy lifting is actually done by a great company called Electric Imp (https://electricimp.com/). They take care of OTA, device connectivity, security, etc.

We manage OTA, etc. for these controllers. No prompt, we typically roll new firmware out in waves with these controllers. They are not binary :smile:

:cheers: