Hi everyone!
At 3AM EST tomorrow morning, your monitor will receive an update to its firmware. You won’t see anything user facing here, but the update makes some minor bug fixes and general optimizations to device detection.
You will experience a short data gap in the process.
For this update, the changes were:
-Fixed an issue with dropping wattage samples
-Optimized communication with our data logging packages
@RyanAtSense, although it may not change the UI, your customers in general and active folk on here would be most interested to learn if detection optimization addresses any of the types of issues we’ve been reporting, including what I’ve perceived as an uptick in odd detection behavior in the last month or so>
That way we’d be able to provide feedback on our perception of the improvements
Hey Dave. Honestly, we don’t usually include firmware release notes because they’re kinda boring in most cases. The biggest device detection updates are what comes through when new models get pushed to your device and not firmware, which tends to account for little bugs and framework changes. But I can make it a point to include some more specific notes in the future! Just don’t expect anything too interesting! 
For this update, the changes were:
-Fixed an issue with dropping wattage samples
-Optimized communication with our data logging packages
I may be wrong, but I’d be willing to guess the kind of people buying these devices and taking part in this community are not the kind of people that would find that level of detail boring. 
I’m with you on that. There’s a little problem that @RyanAtSense and co have to deal with though, which is providing clues to their secret sauce in software release notes or providing marketing help to the competition by advertising issues.
Having been active in the forum for a few months now, I perceive some recurrent issues. I’d like to see a current (top ten) system issues list plus corrective action status, noting if an app, firmware or back end update is intended to address in part or whole.
I think this can be done in a way that helps the community, helps Sense by enabling us to provide better feedback and doesn’t help the competition.
Completely agree, @dave_n_s. I also work for a software & services company and appreciate there’s a fine line where you inadvertently risk giving away secret sauce.
Any clarity/transparency is appreciated even if it is as simple as “We feel you should see a reduction in situations where [THING] would take place in the past.”
Anything that enables us to provide actionable feedback “Yes, that seems better… but.” or “I still see [THING] happening at same/different frequency.” is what I’d like to see. This product completely feels like a crowd sourced effort, where the source is a combination of both our personal data (the vast majority of it) and our human experience component.
and @dave_n_s
Thanks for the feedback, guys. I’ll definitely make it a point to share what we can for firmware updates, no matter how low level. But, as you both note, some things just can’t be shared for a variety of reasons. As a consumer, I definitely appreciate that level of transparency for the music tech stuff I buy, so your feedback makes total sense.
You will find that our app update release notes are a lot more detailed, but I’ll keep this convo in mind when writing those as well.
FWIW, it looks like my device updated and is still chugging along. 
Would this have caused “Aquarium Heat” which has been faithfully reporting for weeks to disappear today? In lieu, Sense discovered a new device, “Heat 3” where 44% of Community Names = “Aquarium heat”. I thought we got it nailed … I have to set notifications and watch the heater light to see if it coincides with Sense.
That needs reporting to our good friends support@sense.com. Detection happens in the back-end, however the analysis of your power consumption and conversion into parametric form happens in the sense unit, so a change of firmware could conceivably change the parametric interpretation of usage when the aquarium heater is on, resulting in it no longer matching the model that it previously did.
Whatever the reason, unless you moved the heater on to the opposite side of your 240V supply, or its consumption changed significantly for some reason, this shouldn’t happen.
Hmm. That sounds odd and we haven’t heard any other similar reports. As @dave_n_s said, definitely shoot a message over to Support! I’m sure they can get whatever is causing it resolved.
Ryan have you had any reports of devices not upgrading their firmware? The sense app still shows me at firmware version 1.9.1768
Not sure if there is a correlation…I only had my Sense for about 1 1/2 week. Sense was showing the voltage around 120.4 and 120.7, but after the update I’m seeing 122.4 and 123.2.
Funny you say that. I thought I was dreaming things up earlier today, but I also feel like my electric provider from what I remember showed around 3 volts lower on the old firmware. I’m now showing ~123.x volts on each leg. Maybe it’s all in my head but I have no way of going back to see earlier data.
Well, as it turned out, newly discovered Heat 3 was indeed the aquarium heater. So I just renamed Heat 3 to Aquarium heater, and it is reporting happily.
But wait, there’s more!
We did laundry last night, and lo and behold, the Dryer is no longer in the device list. To differentiate from the aquarium heater scenario, no “new” device was discovered to substitute for the dryer. What is going on?
Want to shoot me a message w/ your serial #? I know there’s a few that haven’t updated yet but will over the next couple days, but I can look into yours to find out exactly what’s happening.
This doesn’t sound firmware related, but strange things happen. I would definitely shoot support a message re: this. support@sense.com
Could you both send me your serial #s and I can look into this?
I did report it, and Julia from Customer Support has responded:
“Thank you for reaching out to us! Regarding the missing devices, after we had made the changes from our end the devices were temporarily removed so that Sense can re-learn them with a newer, more accurate set of data and prevent confusion between the other devices. As this is the case, the dryer should reappear in the list of devices after about 10-15 days. If the dryer doesn’t reappear, it is possible that Sense just needs some more time to re-learn the dryer in your home. However, if this happens please be sure to reach out to us so that we can look further into this. I apologize for the inconvenience, and if you have any questions or concerns please let me know!”
I believe the “changes made” were in response to an earlier ticket that I opened regarding confusion between devices. So you’re right, it is not firmware related. Probably just a coincidence that this happened on firmware update day.
As an update to the above couple issues…
re: some firmware not updating, if you’re having a wifi outage or dealing with a weak wifi signal, firmware update can try and fail. It will retry the following night and again the following night until it successfully updates. So make sure your wifi signals are strong!
re: voltage changes, we ran a few pre and post firmware update tests and aren’t seeing anything at all suspect, just standard 0-3v voltage variations. Definitely nothing firmware related there.
But keep them coming! If something weird is happening that you think may be related to the latest update, let me know and we’ll get to the bottom of it.