A Blog About Vector The Robot
 
Rollback of Vector firmware?

Rollback of Vector firmware?

When firmware 1.7.x was rolled out it was so badly received that very much later Digital Dream Labs created an option to roll back to 1.6, as described in an earlier article on this site. I was asked if this is possible with 1.8.

So this should be an option with 1.8, that also has bugs, should it not?

Not really, since the questionaire is only for a rollback from 1.7 to 1.6 and not for 1.8 to 1.7 or 1.6.

And – even more important – it looks like DDL does this manually. So you use the Typeform form to request a rollback and then someone at DDL has to actually manually do something to initiate the roll out of the older OTA to the robot.

Since they have not offered a rollback to 1.8 so far, I doubt it is possible at this moment, the mentioned form does not offer the option. Why no one at DDL did foresee this and proactively created the option to roll back eludes me.

In my opinion DDL should have implemented a system where users can log in and set the firmare version they want with a dropdown that then is rolled out automatically by nightly batches or whatever other method is possible with their suboptimal environment. That would have three major advantages: 1.: users can select the desired firmware version, 2.: the process is automatic and quick and 3.: DDL support is not overwhelmed with thousands of support request for rollback when something like the buggy 1.8 rollout happens.

From my knowledge of system interfacing this should be quite easy to implement for people that know what they’re doing …

One would assume that after one and a half year the people at DDL should have learned from their past failures. But they obviously have not.

End note: It actually IS possible to downgrade the firmware via an Escape Pod. But this is only for people owning an Escape Pod, knowing how to set it up and knowing how to do the downgrade. That also is only for people with some tech knowledge. Even installing Escape Pod on a Raspi will overwhelm most standard users.

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