Telos Mesh V2 is the revolutionary grow light control designed to help growers understand their plants better and save energy with Precise PPFD, the ability to group Telos (and 3rd party) lights into multiple grow rooms, and benefit from many usability and functional improvements such as the new Network-Lock feature.
This guide will explain how to easily upgrade the Telos app and firmware in one seamless process. The video featured below offers a quick start guide for updating Telos Mesh V2. Continue reading to learn more about how the upgrade works and the ways in which the app’s new features will benefit growers and their plants.
Step 1: Head over to the Android Play Store or Apple App Store to update the Telos app to the latest version.
Step 2: When prompted, update the network to V2 as this is where all the new features are stored. Note: it is perfectly fine to choose not to upgrade and to stick to a V1 network.
Step 3: If upgrading to V2, the app will prompt to upgrade the firmware on any Mesh controlled lights. Ensure network connection is established and within 5 meters of the grow lights. Press ‘upgrade all’ and the process will begin.
Step 4: The firmware is bundled within the latest version of the app and will upgrade each grow light one by one. Do not remove power and stay within range of the grow lighting.
Grow Rooms is a powerful and long-awaited feature of Telos Mesh V2. Growers can now create separate “grow rooms”, such as vegetative or flowering, and add lights into a respective space and make global adjustments that will affect the entire room. Lots of valuable data is available on this page, users can quickly view photometric and power data such as current wattage being used and what efficiency the lights are running at.
When setting up a room, to access the most important information it is recommended to input the grow room dimensions and wall material. The Telos Mesh app will generate an accurate average PPFD reading at canopy level for the entire room. Previously, this was something that was only achievable by use of expensive PAR and quantum sensors.
Precise PPFD is unique to the Telos Mesh app. This feature will generate an average PPFD reading at canopy level for the entire grow room.
Precise PPFD is accessible through the “Rooms” page, found at the bottom menu on the Telos App.
In order to pull through the most important data, the user must set up a “grow room” by entering in the room dimensions and wall material, for example, a 1.2 x 2.4m grow tent with white mylar walls.
The app will take this data and verified photometric data from Telos and some third-party lighting to generate the Precise PPFD reading.
Any changes to the quantity or intensity of your lighting are immediately reflected in the average PPFD value.
In version 2 of the Telos app, the decision was made to upgrade the “Privacy-Lock” feature to “Network-Lock”. Previously with privacy-lock, the user would have to enable this feature for each light that was required to be hidden from devices seeking a Bluetooth connection; this was done on the node page for each light. Depending on how many lights are connected to the network, activating privacy lock on all lights could be a lengthy process.
Network-lock is much quicker and easier to use and makes protecting your privacy even simpler with the latest version of Telos Mesh. After installing the update, the network-lock will become accessible via the settings page.
When this is activated by the user, all lights on the network will be automatically switched into lock mode at once and the status LED will switch from blue (Bluetooth) to purple (lock-mode).
Lock-mode prevents the lights from sending Bluetooth advertising signals, meaning the lights cannot be seen by anyone outside of the network. It also prevents accidental changes to your power settings. The network will remember all input settings and continue to follow lighting schedules whilst in lock-mode.
As an added layer of security, manual intervention is required to deactivate lock-mode. Tap 5 times on the touch sensor of any node to deactivate network-lock from all the lights on the network. The user can now reconnect their smartphone to the network and adjust their settings.
Telos has always supported existing customers with upgrades; this update will activate the cutting-edge real-time clock hardware contained within the Telos Mesh driver. Accurate timekeeping is very important to keep growing schedules running consistently.
Most real-time clocks are powered by a button cell battery which dramatically limits the lifespan of the device. Telos chose to pair the RTC with a supercapacitor rather than a battery. The RTC constantly keeps time, but if the power is cut, the supercapacitor kicks in and the light will continue to keep time for another 24 hours.
In the unlikely event that power has been removed for longer than 24 hours, the status LED will now indicate that it does not have the correct time by intermittently flashing red. The red flash will replace the green flash which is active when a schedule has been applied to a light. To rectify, simply reconnect the lights to the Telos Mesh network and the time will automatically update and synchronise.
Note: For larger networks, as long as one light still has the time there is no need to reconnect, as every 15 minutes the lights will share the time to the network and any lights that are out of sync will be updated.
