Many days of disabled Cayenne systems in the field. Promises of fix within 24 hours, then the next 24, etc. Sure wish I could look at the Cayenne page with the temperatures and controls of my log cabin 1200 miles North in Vermont. HOPE my furnace is running! And, I was going to Demo it at the Gainesville Makerfaire tomorrow.
Cayenne is at its FTDI moment. Google “FTDI bricks hundreds of boards in the field”. FTDI produced a very popular USB chip used in Arduinos and many other devices. About 4 years ago some “FTDI” chips in the field were found to be counterfeits. They worked ok however, until someone at FTDI figured out how to BRICK them with a driver update that was distributed through Windows. There was a huge uproar and discussion in the engineering community and many designers vowed “I will never design in FTDI again! I will never trust them again.”
I once was responsible for automated tool interface strategy for a major IBM factory. I decided to learn a little main frame programming and I took a class in “JCL” for system 370 from a guy named Dr. Dobbs. On coffee break, I asked him “what’s your doctorate in?” He looked up and down the hallway both ways and then said “Uh, Divinity… You know, I had these logic courses at Yale, and I got into writing APL and stuff.”
As Dr. D said, way back then, “The reason God was able to create the world in 7 days was that he didn’t have to worry about the installed base!”
I have to find other more reliable solutions for my customers.
You are right on the subject, simply to many changes at the same time some of them major, have lead for system to be half or unusable for many developers, it got us to situation that we dont know if the problem is coding/mobile application/web application or a server issue.
One step at a time would be much simpler and safer solution for both tinkerers and profesional users, and with less frustrations/recoding and concerns if the devices that are already in use are working or not.
Thanks for your thoughts here. This is an open forum, so we appreciate all feedback.
You are right. There are some major changes that were released. And with any major changes there will be some pain points for people that did not follow transition timeline / instructions. We did email all Cayenne users 2 months in advance to encourage the switch over to new MQTT libraries.
Cayenne is given away for free, so we have some leverage to make these changes as we wish. The reason for these changes is so that we can provide more reliable service to our users and push out new features that utilize the newer mqtt based services (like the new data console). Coming up, we would like to provide a premium service for the people that need it. If you have customers using Cayenne, then we are moving in a direction that you will appreciate since these updates ultimately benefit them.
And we are doing many of these changes one step at a time. The first of these steps was Arduino. Next will be Raspberry Pi. And then we will be switching the Cayenne triggers engine to a much more stable robust service that will enable more powerful trigger logic w/ complex statements.
So, hang in there, keep giving us the feedback, we will try to resolve all major issues as quickly as possible, and thank you so much for being so passionate and part of the Cayenne community.