I have a few more weeks before irrigation season starts. My Rachio is brand-new and has not been mounted in the garage, where the Rain Bird unit is it will replaced. In other words, for the time being assisting with troubleshooting and beta testing will not have an impact on my irrigation operation. Where do I sign up?
Currently, my issue is that I cannot add the Rachio to the Home app, at all. My firmware version is 6.3.2.
Is there a way to restrict the Rachio to using a 2.4 GHz band, only?
2.4 GHz has better penetration through dry obstacles than 5 GHz does. As a general rule RF absorption by non-conductive materials increases with frequency. That is, by the way, the advantage of the Verizon cell network—when they were still the old Ma Bell AT&T, they had almost exclusive access to cell spectrum and picked all the low frequencies.
Here’s hoping to having a working HomeKit for the 2021 season (Midwest Lawn owner)… I turn my sprinklers on next week, and honestly a little shocked that since news broke last October about fixing the issue, we don’t even have a beta out there to work with yet, let alone a working release… Every IOS app update I get, I am hoping to load it up and see a FW update and/or fix, but have yet to receive an updated FW. Anyways…
Is there any way the MODS can create a separate topic, have it stickied, and have all the updates posted in it? Hard to dig through 800+ posts on here trying to see where we stand with updates.
Thanks.
Completely agree.
I believe these are the last two actual updates:
I tend to disagree with his somewhat. Months ago they were providing weekly updates, just go back through this thread and most of the updates kept us all quiet and grateful.
It felt like things were moving forward, the weekly updates stopped.
Inconsistent at best, they have not been kept up with. While I am grateful for the updates we have gotten the current status of communication is poor compared to what we had been getting.
Thanks for the feedback @alexrodriguez. Can I get more thoughts on this (from everyone)?
0 voters
Can you create a separate topic
have it stickied
have all the updates posted in it?
What is the voodoo about adding this controller back in?
Sometimes it adds back in no problem at quickly and easily.
Other times it involves unplugging the controller, restarting, my iPhone using my iPad instead of my iPhone. I basically go down that list over and over again to restart the add wifi process by force quitting the app and holding down the wifi button. Sometimes I’ll just do all of them and still it takes multiple times.
As you are improving the app here is an annoying bug in it right now. This happens about 80% of the time. As a workaround as long as I hit cancel after the controller turns blue I’ll get the next screen where it actually adds it back in.
!
It seems part of the problem is that Rachio is not putting priority on fixing the problem. If they were, a poll question like this wouldn’t even be posted. The skillset needed to resolve doesn’t seem to be there or this would have been fixed a long time ago.
They are not, just looks back at the posts in this thread. This one below confirms it.
I would imagine that HomeKit support is among the smaller of things that Rachio has to deal with. It would be interesting to know how many people actually purchased the Rachio3 just for HomeKit support versus a really good irrigation controller
Well it was advertised as one of the main reasons to upgrade to the Rachio version 3.
This feature was heavily promoted by Apple and was the sole reason that I spent over $200 for it as there are many other much less controllers that do not have HomeKit. My old Rainbird controller worked just fine but as I wanted HomeKit I bought the Rachio.
It is still advertised by Apple and Amazon as a HomeKit controller.
While my expectations for HK functionality were fairly low, I did specifically buy this for HK support. So it would be fair to say I’m frustrated about the HK functionality being nonexistent.
I’ve been on the engineering and product management side so the Rachio team has my empathy in their efforts to address this. But also my disappointment in prioritizing new features over advertised features and the lack of updates / communication. Feeling “forgotten” is no fun.
I am being torn between wanting to be patient and understanding and feeling the righteous indignation some of the other poster express. I, too, purchased it, because of advertised HomeKit support.
I definitely am hoping for it to be fixed very soon. Can the dev team hire someone who really understands HomeKit well?
I agree with this. As a software engineer if I said we should prioritize new feature work over fixing existing highly-visible features that are not working I would be reprimanded.
Just yesterday I was fixing a sprinkler with muddy hands and my AirPods in my ear and I thought “wow this would have been a great time to tell Siri to turn on the system so I can test”. This should be priority number 1 to fix, all hands on deck and delay all other work.
It sounded like they hired a contractor to do some of it last summer; not sure what the current status of that is (if there is still a contractor involved)
For that specific task, you can use Google Assistant (takes only a few minutes to set up) and it works fine. It unfortunately is not a general hands-free solution, as you can’t specify how long a zone should run, nor does it work with Apple Watch.
Saying this light-heartedly @Stewart …
But what you’ve suggested is for @Blizzardman to buy a new phone and wireless headphones to resolve a problem with his sprinkler controller. Feels like a nuclear option.
AirPods can trigger google assistant on an iPhone by voice?
I don’t have ANY Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa tech at all, so I don’t know how to do this - can you give a brief rundown of what’s involved please Stewart?
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