melev

About a year ago, Apex released their beta Dashboard firmware. A friend of mine installed it instantly and raved about it, but I held off. Beta means it was still in the testing phase, and I didn't know what may or may not happen with it installed. My tank already has a number of areas where things could potentially go wrong (power outage, tornado, house falling in) so why add computer error to the mix?

First of all, here's the old look I've been looking at for two years.

Today, I finally decided I needed to get this updated. I found the update information on Neptune's website: http://www.neptunesystems.com/firmwa...-version-4-20/

The first thing I did was save my current configuration file to my desktop. Log into the Apex with your browser of choice, go to the Configuration menu and click on the "load/save" menu item. The bottom choice on that page will be "Save Apex Configuration". It will quickly download a tiny file called "apexcfg.bin" which I then rename to include the date of download: "apexcfg-Aug16-2013.bin" -- that's it. Done.

I then downloaded the firmware updater software. It comes in PC or Mac, so pick what you need.

Running it was easy. Drag the .dmg file to my Applications folder, click on the above icon and the program opened up with three choices.

The middle option did nothing for me (no idea why) so I selected the bottom option. I typed in the IP address of my Apex and the Port number. It found it and I got this screen. Due to paranoia, I changed the IP address in this image.

Next, I clicked "Update Firmware" and the bottom area of the window displayed what was being installed as the progress bar filled in. It was quick, maybe 10 seconds. (You MUST have your Apex hardwired to your router and computer, not over Wifi)

"Update Web Pages" took longer, and the Apex chimed its little song, notifying me about its recent reboot. The lights on my tank didn't even flicker off. When the Web Pages were completely updated, I cleared my browser's Cache and loaded the new Dashboard.

Quick and painless. This blog entry took longer to type up than the process of updating my Apex. Besides the nicer look and feel of the browser-based access, it will allow me to add webcams to the tank so I can see how things are going remotely. Cool!