Hello Thor Community,
Javelin helpfully pointed me at this thread today. For reference, here is a post I made earlier today that relates to this subject:
http://www.thorforums.com/forums/f8/...-g7-17917.html
My wife and I purchased a 2019 Thor Outlaw 37RB back in April of this year. Within the first week we had the coach, strange things started to happen. We would come home to find the slides in the opposite state that we left them in, all of the interior and exterior lights on, the furnace running and/or the awnings out. After the first occurrence, I wrote it off as a glitch. Now several months in, we have seen this behavior numerous times. This has even happened a few times while we were sitting in the coach.
When this occurs, I can look at the inbuilt control screen or my iPhone App and see that all of the control buttons appear to be simultaneously activated. To recover I have to go through each page of the panel or all and touch each item to refresh it's status and then bring the coach back to the desired state.
When Javelin pointed me at this thread, I was relieved to find out that I'm not alone in this. Thanks Javelin!
Being a veteran of the home automation trade, I am no stranger to events like this. Insteon suffers from a similar malody in certain conditions and I believe this situation is very similar.
My theory is that this is caused by overlapping transmissions from the "Multiplex" wireless button pads. If you sit and look at your button pads, you will notice that every so often the green LEDs will blink. This is the button pad transmitting it's heartbeat and status to the G7 control panel. If two or more of the button pad transmissions overlap, the G7 receives a corrupted message. I believe this is what causes the random events to occur.
Years ago, network engineers developed a protocol called CSMA/CD or "Carrier sense, Multiple access with Collision Section" to combat corrupted network transmissions from multiple nodes transmitting at the same time. This requires each device to be capable of both transmitting and receiving. In our case, I believe the button pads are only capable of transmit making such a protocol impossible.
In the case of the G7, the firmware needs to be modified to reject any command affecting more than item per transmission. Not knowing the underlying codebase, this is easy to say, possibly not so easy to implement.
If you would like to test my theory in your coach, here is how:
Figure the mean time between unexpected events. For me this is roughly one event every 10-15 days. Remove the batteries from all but one (your most important) button pad. Wait long enough beyond the mean time to feel confident that things are working properly. Replace the batteries in the remainder of the button pads and you should begin to see these unexpected events again. I highly suspect that the greater the number of wireless button pads in your coach, the more frequent these unexpected events will occur. For reference, in our Outlaw, we have 7 pads and the Touch panel which is wired back to the G7,
I am eager to hear if any of the firmware changes that the folks in this thread have tried have helped at all.
I look forward to working with this community to find a resolution to this very serious and dangerous situation.
-Xathros
2019 Thor Outlaw 37RB
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