Recently I acquired a Nuvo Grand Concerto (GC) to serve as a whole home audio unit for the new home I’m building. I plan on having 6 zones of audio, with MP3, AM/FM, music fully controllable in each. Since the house isn’t quite finished and my technogeek kicked in, I decided to open the box and connect the system together to verify it works.
The Nuvo manual is very straight forward and to the point, with several diagrams for quick reference, which great for guys like me who plug in cables first and read the manual later.
After starting everything up I found the GC came from the factory with version 2.06 which is not bad (but not the latest either). So I decided to upgrade the GC firmware to the latest version, 2.10.
For this I needed to download the GC 2.10 configurator software available from Nuvo in the ProZone section of their website.
If you don’t have .NET 1.1 installed you’ll need to install it before you install the 2.10 Configuration Software, you can download it here. With my PC connected to the GC via a DB9 Male/Female serial cable I loaded up the Configurator software and started playing around with it.
There is a ton of things you can do with the configurator, and while most of these features are available via the keypads themselves, the configurator application does make initial setup much more convenient. I won’t get into the details of everything you can do, because quite frankly it’s a lot, and that’s what the manual is for anyway.
Once I tweaked the names of sources, zones, and other minor things I hit “download to GC” and let the firmware upgrade process begin. It took roughly 1 minute to update, I then proceeded to plug in one of the keypads which displayed a message “2.06” at first my heart sank and I thought, “oh no it didn’t work” then the screen turned black (cue the scary halloween music). After a few seconds I saw the firmware updating message, and for what seemed like a long time (my brother says 15 seconds) the keypad rebooted and displayed version 2.10 – success!!
So there you have it, I tested the system to make sure it was all functional, and successfully updated the GC from version 2.06 to 2.10. This blog entry has become longer than I thought it would, and I haven’t even discussed things like sound quality, feedback display, overall design etc. there is just so much to write about. Stay tuned for my next entry where I’ll hopefully get around to talking about all these issues and more.Now there were a couple parts during this update were I was tempted to press buttons on the keypad and figure out what was going on. My advice is if you are impatient such as myself - take a couple deep breaths, count to twenty and let the device do its thing and don’t interfere.
To quote that weird cuddly-toy-guy on American Inventor “everything will be alright...”