New Elk Firmware

I love the creativity that everyone involved in HA manages to come up with when it comes to making a product do what they need it to do for a given situation. There's a number of ways to work around this problem and many others. Like most people that frequent this forum I could easily implement what you suggested. Another example is the M1 rules language, its very primitive but certainly I and many others have written rules that are able to work around most of those limitations. The downside is that it simply shifts the burden for a fix to somewhere else in the process and those efforts are sometimes repeated over and over. If that modified keypad develops a problem one wouldn't be able to change it out as quickly as an unmodified version. A primitive language doesn't always "flow" very well and it becomes difficult to follow the logic of the statements. It also limits the ability to make quick changes without disturbing some cleverly crafted element of the prior code.

In terms of this thread, I was more focused on Elk's change / revision process, where the product was both today and in the future. The lesson learned for me is that I am unlikley to see features added quickly or often and some things will never be added based on current platform or certification limitations. I still see the M1 as a valuable component in an overall HA solution but I will shift some of the focus for the functionality I need to other components based on this lesson.
 
If you are only concerned with dimming the backlight on a single keypad, why not open it up, remove or cover the LED, and add an LED attached to an external driver. You can then use ELK rules via contact closure to set the LED to dim or bright, etc. You can buy LED drivers pretty cheaply, at least for low-current single LED applications, or build your own with a few dollars in parts.
Now something like that is really putting the DIY back in to DIY! If the dim level of a keypad has made it to the top of the list, then hopefully there would now be time to git-r-done.
And far less expensive than 50 g's :)
And a great post for the "How-to" section as well.
 
I am one of those few that have had to return my panel to ELK. This is because i was stupid and managed to blow it up past all it's protections.

What followed was a very helpfull telephone conversation, me shipping my board to them. Within 2 days i got the call that i had indeed killed it. They offered a replacement board at a reasonable price (the way i killed it was definetely not covered under warranty and for good reasons), and 2 or 3 days later the replacement board arrived.

I am a new user, but can say nothing but good things about ELK. The market is so small and the development cost for these features so great, it's expectable that new features take time to add.

I don't know how this process has gone, but it would indeed be good if ELK (Spanky) could repsond to feature requests with a likelyhood of implementation. But this process woudl be difficult to manage.

Since i researched the product before i bought it know what it can and cannot do. I expect then to be very responsive for bugfixes, but additional features are just a nice to have. Buying a panel based on the assumption that it 'may' do something in the future seems silly as does expecting ever increasing funtionaility without paying additional money.

The keypad in my bedroom is dimmed enough in the lowest setting that it's not a problem for us at night. You could turn it completely off too. Most alarm panels would likely not even give you this functionality.

THANKS ELK FOR YOUR GREAT PRODUCT AND EFFORTS TO SUPPORT IT.
 
You have to give ELK a lot of credit for what they have done in a SMALL industry. The Elk M1 is a great product, but battling against HAI and its huge base of pro installers is a big challenge. I'm sure the DIY community is very important, but it is only a little piece of the bigger picture. When people I talk to think of ELK, they don't think of the M1 or the DIY world, but of a slew of other products that have built ELK's reputation as an excellent engineering company. Take a look at their full line of products, then look at how frequently they pop up elsewhere. Even the worthington catalog pushes ELK batteries for HAI products.
 
The good, bad, and ugly. Your comments are inspiring and appreciated. Never stop asking for more because that is the future.
 
Gotta love new firmware! Just saw this on Elk's site - Looks like mainly some fixes, none of which apply to me... Probably will pass on this upgrade unless there is something that is not listed in the release notes.

Anyone care to comment on their experience?
As info -
Applied the update with no noted difference as of yet.
 
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