Commissioning tutorial part 4: Control Systems grid - Network settings and Firmware upgrades

Having assigned our controllers to our site, the next step is to bring their firmware up to date. The zencontrol control systems and related components are under constant development and on the average site timelines there is a fair chance that a number of improvements have been made in the time that passed between when they were installed and when it comes time to do the initial commissioning.

Before we can update our controllers, though, we'll need to make sure that they have a connection to the zencontrol cloud.

This task is going to introduce us to Grid View, which is a spreadsheet-style web interface for managing zencontrol systems. Head to the cloud now at https://cloud.zencontrol.com and log in, then select your site and then Grid view from the site dashboard:

When we first arrive, we should find ourselves on the Control System page, which should have our control systems listed alongside the information we inputted in the commissioning application in the previous article.

There's a bit to unpack here, but first let's focus on the spreadsheet itself. We can see a number of columns but the most interesting to us right now is the Connection Status (the small coloured symbol one column to the right of the row number), Issues and the Version.

Connection status

The connection status will usually report one of three things:

	The controller is online
	The controller is offline
	The controller was online in the past hour

Hovering over these icons (other than the green circle) will give some more information as to when the controller was last seen, for example:

If any of your control systems show as offline, you'll need to provide them a path to the internet and an adequate network configuration. They default to DHCP, so the main things you want to ensure here are that:

• There is an active internet connection available.
• There is a DHCP server on the local network - usually this is the router.
• The network configuration provided by the DHCP server sets the gateway to the IP address of the correct gateway (usually the router's IP address), and the that the IP and subnet is able to reach that gateway. For more information on this please see our earlier primer on Networked Lighting Controls.
• There are no firewall or access control rules in place which would prohibit the controller from reaching the cloud. For more information on this see What are the network requirements for cloud connected devices?
• There is a DNS server available which can resolve connect.zencontrol.com - usually this is the router.

Issues

Many of the grid view tabs have an issues column which reports the issues which have been reported for that control system or device. There's a full write-up here at Reported Issues, and they're colour coded by severity.

In some cases you'll see in the sync status column, which may indicate that the current firmware version of the controller predates the issue subsystem (we'll get to fixing this in a moment) or that issues tracking hasn't been enabled for the site.

Version

The current firmware version of the control system is listed here. Before we start commissioning, we want to bring these up to the latest version, we'll explore the two methods of doing that at the end of this next.

Firmware upgrades

To bring everything up to date, we have a couple of options. We can directly trigger the upgrade, or we can create an upgrade window via the the site's upgrade settings.

We're explaining both here, but you only need to choose one.

Calling a direct upgrade

Within the Control Systems tab in Grid View, right-click on a specific controller (or select a number of controllers) here and select Upgrade firmware and then the desired version:

The version tags go from most to least stable. Recommended is the most tested, stable version but without the newer fixes and improvements which one might find in Latest, and Beta is the bleeding edge of features but without the stability of Latest or Recommended.

Creating an upgrade window

We've seen the upgrade preferences briefly already during the creation of the site, but we're going to go back now and modify them to allow controller upgrades. Select the "Site details" button on the left and navigate to "Settings":

Taking a closer look at these control system upgrade preferences, we can see that we can schedule an upgrade window and a target version:

For our purposes (preparing a new site for commissioning), we're going to enable the window for a couple of days and set the target release to Latest.

The upgrade process for an individual controller depends on a number of things, but the main factors are the internet connection, where you are in the world and the number of control systems you are upgrading in parallel. With a good connection you can expect the process to finish within a few minutes, though, and while the upgrade takes place you will see the Sync Status change to "Paused for Upgrade".

Network settings

Once the controllers have been brought online and up to date, if we have some specific network requirements for those controllers then we can apply them now. This can be done in the app as well, but since we're on the cloud already head back to Grid view -> Control Systems and across to the Network tab to list the control systems alongside their current network settings. This page is also useful if you need to provide a list of MAC addresses to IT or other onsite services.

By double-clicking on the Desired Network column for a controller you can designate the network settings for that control system. In the case that the site is happy to use DHCP, or the leases are static but managed by the DHCP server then it's not necessary to touch any of these, but if static assignment of the controllers themselves is required then you can use that form.