John,
At least in my case, I don’t think the lockups are related to the solenoids switching on. At first I thought that was the case, but then I started noticing that the controller was locking up when nothing was going on. When it was connected via ethernet I’ve had several instances of finding the controller unresponsive to its buttons even when it’s just been sitting idle. Then I thought perhaps the act of connecting to it was causing the lockups, and while I’m not as sure about that now, I think it’s still a possibility. If Ray is correct that a DNS timeout causes problems, and if connecting to it causes it to refresh the Weather data (which is the only thing in my setup that uses DNS), that could explain how making a connection to it could cause a lockup.
Interestingly, shortly after I posted my last reply I tried to access the controller from my iPad and it timed out trying to connect. Then I tried accessing it from my iPhone and it also timed out, so I went to the controller and the display indicated it was trying to connect to the WiFi and all of the buttons were responding as they should (so it wasn’t locked up). With my iPhone right next to the controller I could see that I had a strong signal. The controller continued trying to connect, then acted like it had connected only to revert back to showing it was trying to connect a second or two later. I reset the powerline WiFi extender that I think it’s connecting to (I can’t be sure because the extender uses the same SSID as my other access points), but the controller still wasn’t connecting, so I left it sitting there while I ran an errand. About an hour and a half later when I returned I tried connecting from my iPhone again and it worked, so somehow it got itself sorted out while I was gone.
This isn’t the first time since I’ve had it using WiFi that I’ve thought it was locked up because it wouldn’t connect, only to find out that the controller buttons were still working fine and then it would eventually allow me to connect again without me having to reset the controller. When it was connected via Ethernet, I think every time it failed to connect it was due to the controller being locked up. Obviously I would rather have it fail to connect without being due to a lockup that can leave a station running, but either way it’s frustrating that sometimes you can’t access it to see what’s still running or to fire off another zone. I think the ethernet connection is a more reliable connection in general, so if we can get past the lockups I would switch back to ethernet right away.
I agree that this must not be a really widespread problem, and that tends to give some credibility to the theory that the ethernet module is susceptible to specific unusual network traffic. I have quite a number of different devices in my network, and I tend to add new things periodically, so it’s entirely possible that I added a problematic device within the last 6 to 12 months (when I started seeing lockups on my 2.3AC controller). I’m thinking that a hardware based TCP/IP stack ethernet module would likely cure the problem. Ray seems to think that it may not be terribly difficult to implement this because apparently it uses the same API, so code changes should be very minimal. I don’t know what it would do to the cost of the ethernet module… that might be a big negative.