Crestron Home 3.19 was released today.

This release has as one of its headline changes the ability to Hotswap drivers.

Here is the description of the new feature from Crestron’s Blog

“Hot-Swapping” Crestron Extensions

Prior to this update, upgrading extensions was not as quick and easy as it could have been. “We’d see extension developers add new features, and dealers would then want to upgrade that extension in existing systems,” Oster explains. “If one wanted to swap version 1.0 to 2.0, it was more painful in the past.” For example, suppose the driver brought a specific feature to every keypad in a home. As soon as the original version of the extension was deleted to make room for the 2.0 upgrade, all of the configurations, quick actions — name it — would disappear from every keypad. “With ‘hot-swappable’ drivers, a dealer can replace that extension without losing any of the programming,” says Oster. “All the quick connections, all the sequences, all still connected — which can save a dealer hours of labor.”

Another positive of the “hot-swap:” There’s no reboot required. Oster explains, “In the past if driver developers just changed one line of code to fix a bug or to test something, they would have to send their file again, reboot the processor, wait for a few minutes, and then finally test their line of code.” The update eliminates all those inefficient steps.

LCD produce a host of extension drivers and we have been working very closely with Crestron on Hot-Swap support for our drivers the since feature was announced to the developer community in June 2022. Some of the changes to the architecture behind the scenes meant that we had to re-invent a large portion of our code to achieve parity features for our driver ecosystem. This work went on throughout the end of last year alongside extensive testing of Crestron’s multiple beta versions of the hot-swappable solution.

After a thorough assessment of the readiness of the hot-swappable feature for production systems and our own position, we have made the decision not to implement the hot-swappable solution as at the release of 3.19. Our existing drivers will still work on a system upgraded to 3.19 however the process of upgrading or removing our drivers will remain as a manual process.

Although we have been anticipating the Hot-Swap solution being released we have discovered just today through Crestron’s blog post that the c.27th of March was the release date for 3.19 and indeed the Hot-Swap feature has been included. At this point in time we have not been able to confirm the final release candidate used for testing against our existing drivers. So where you have existing systems running our drivers in production we would recommend not upgrading them immediately to 3.19 until my team and I have had the opportunity to do further testing on the production release.

• Category: Blog