“Hot-Swapping” Crestron Extensions
Crestron continue to push the technological boundaries of Crestron Home with regular updates. While this is welcome, we would suggest that any new technology, especially in the context of customers’ home systems, be given a chance to stabilise. The latest update to Crestron Home – 3.19 – sees the new dawn of Hot Swap for Crestron Drivers. Jason Oster, Crestron’s director of product management for residential solutions explains “With ‘hot-swappable’ drivers, a dealer can replace that extension without losing any of the programming. All the quick connections, all the sequences, all still connected — which can save a dealer hours of labour.”
We fully support the rationale of being able to swap drivers while maintaining configuration. However, we would like to suggest caution in adopting this new feature as, unfortunately, we have had little exposure to the new technology, other than beta releases and, as a result, we have been unable to fully test our, approximately 100, drivers to ensure it’s a smooth process for you.
We are here to support all Crestron dealers who’ve bought our drivers, so will do everything we can to help, however we’ve limited understanding of what the real impact will be so please follow these steps to help:
* Please don’t run headlong into updating your clients systems to 3.19 … especially not on #FirmwareFriday 😉.
* Please try and explain to your clients that there may be some disruption, but also re-assure them that Ultamation are committed to resolving any issues as quickly as possible should they be identified.
* Please register for our updates and check our guidance pages which we will update as new releases become available.
* When you do the update, if you find any errors on our drivers please email
· Please bear with us if it takes a little longer than our usual response time.
We know this will make all our lives easier as it matures; it may just be a little bumpy as we fully understand all of the implications and modify existing code to accommodate them.
Please note: Hot Swap currently applies ONLY to extension drivers. Standard device drivers and Platform drivers do not yet enjoy the benefits of “Hot Swap”.
