Hello,
I've recently run around our network of 34, or so, weather stations and upgraded the firmware from the old 1.81 or 1.90 to 3.12. Most of these vantage pro2's (6152C) are located in reasonably remote locations across Tasmania and we have minimal staff to keep it ticking over. (check out
http://epa.tas.gov.au/pages/Real-Time-Air-Quality-Data-for-Tasmania.aspx if you're interested)
So my initial idea was to remotely upgrade the firmware using a serial->tcp bridge and automate the process...BUT, unfortunately sometimes differences in protocol timings and error corrections over a mobile network caused issues in data transmission and hence firmware upload failures on a couple of our consoles during testing. AND, when these units came back from the field and I tried to rerun the FW upgrade directly over serial, I received errors when trying to retrieve the current FW and bootloader versions.
Long story short - Problem = console cooked during FW upgrade (stopped midway through) and unable to restart using FW 3.12 software. Solution = install old FW 1.90 then upgrade to 3.12.
By the way - the main reason to upgrade to FW > 1.90 i.e. 3.X etc was for the configuration screen timeout feature introduced in 3.0. This is particularly useful for larger networks where stations are located in remote areas that may have an irregular power source. Getting stuck in the config screen after a power failure can mean a significant loss of data!
I'm not sure if this issue has been discussed here or elsewhere but I couldn't find anything when searching online (and official sources weren't much help) so I hope this may help anyone that may have accidentally cooked a vp2 console during a firmware upgrade.
