Most of you would know that I am addicted to Kickstarter.
It’s a good thing my budget is more limited that my desires, or else I would be swamped by amazing Kickstarter projects.
Every now and then, a project comes along that fits me like a glove and I can’t say no……
A home automation centric router is one such project.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2037429657/almond-80211ac-touchscreen-wifi-router-smart-home
I backed it. I wanted it soooooo bad……
You see we had been using the same router for the past, oh, about 9 years…. I had been using it in Australia before we left…. and it was dying. Big time.
We were all used to power cycling it every week or less. It was the only way to get ‘the internet’ back up and running.
Not only but it was a little slow. We were barely getting our rated 25/25mB/s up/down speed. (yeah yeah BA, cry me a virtual reality river).
We will talk about it more in this blog, but we run a bit of home automation stuff at home, surprisingly, not all of it is Opto gear and so I was looking for two things, a faster router and a way to tie all my home automation hardware and software together.
That Kickstarter router seemed to offer both.
One of the cool things about Kickstarter is that you get to get your hands on stuff before it’s ready for prime time.
One of the bad things about Kickstarter is that you get to get your hands on stuff before it’s ready for prime time.
Most of the time, this is more cool than bad because if the hardware is good, the rest can be fixed with updates.
Most of my Kickstarter projects are late because the hardware takes longer than they expect to deliver.
The router was on time.
The software was not ready.
They flat out said, ‘we are going to ship a non-functional router’. By then it’s too late to pull out, they have my money…….
Long story blogged, it sat on my shelf for a few months before they ‘shipped’ some ‘working’ software (called firmware, but don’t judge me – I’m blogging to a wide tech range of readers).
Only, it was not working.
I spent hours and hours trying to get it working thinking they would not ship something that flat out does not work.
Posted on their forums my issues, within an hour or so, they posted; ‘yeah, we know it’s broken, but it mostly works’.
I was stunned.
And I was very annoyed that I spent around 5 solid hours trying to get it going (and on top of that, my whole website / home network was down for that 5 hours and I had to call Verizon twice to get the router onto their network – I hate talking on the phone!).
So, I let it sit.
Another update was shipped. I read the forums first, it was also wonky, so I let it slide.
Another update was shipped…..It sounded good.
We are now a solid year since I have had the hardware, a year of weekly, biweekly rebooting my router and putting up with slow(ish) Internet – I am not happy…. I have paid good money and for some crappy software development team, I should have my project…. I mean it’s been a year!!!! How hard can it be to write some router software in Linux?
Another update shipped.
I called Verizon, swapped out the router and spent a few more hours trying to get it going……
Yeah, well, since it’s been a year, and they have totally failed to deliver, they are getting better at not telling the exact truth on their forums……..
So, I have had it.
Enough.
We have got ourselves a paper weight home automation router.
I am soooooo very annoyed.
We just don’t have the money to throw at these guys and not have them deliver something so basic.
I also do NOT have the time to waste trying to get something working that they know full well is not working, but shipped as if it is.
I will never (ever) buy or back another Securifi product again.
Last week we bought an Asus router.
It works a treat.
(I will figure out a different way of binding my home automation gear together).
