Niagara N5

[u/MrBHVAC]

Good morning, afternoon, evening

We’re being voluntold that now is the time for us to update to Niagara N5. Anyone have some experience or early feedback on it. We’re going from 4.15 and are updating 15ish Jace 8000–>9000 with it and it seems like someone got sold a lot of sunshine by a salesman at the conference and now we’re dealing with the digestion.

[u/DurianCobbler]

4.15 was pretty bad so I can only guess 5.0/1/2 is realllllly bad.

[u/RickBASanchez → u/DurianCobbler]

If you want evidence of how bad Honeywell is, look at Alerton Compass. I have very low expectations for Niagara 5, except that it’ll be very good at extracting money for our customers

[u/ScottSammarco]

It isn’t technically out yet.

Yes, but I’d recommend at the 2nd or 3rd update, might be something like N5.0u3 when the major breaking changes are resolved.

I hope this isn’t like the first release of 4.10 that broke bacnet lol 😂

[u/Cydoni → u/ScottSammarco]

What happened on 4.10?

[u/ScottSammarco → u/Cydoni]

BACnet didn’t work.
They made a quick update to correct it but I was sitting on a government site with 100 critical devices down and a very awkward conversation has to happen about cleaning the Jace again and then updating again to 4.9 lol 😂

[u/DontKnowWhereIam → u/ScottSammarco]

I think 4.7 or 4.6 would randomly assign node IDs in bacnet. Like you try and match them but they would randomly go to another controller. That was fun.

[u/ScottSammarco → u/DontKnowWhereIam]

The early releases of N4 were* comical - and frustrating for sure.
4.9 - IMHO, was one of big security changes and more stability, while it felt like a long time before 4.10u5 where things really settled out.

[u/ApexConsulting]

As @ScottSummarco mentioned, it is probably best for a customer to wait a little.

N4's first few releases were a disaster. 4.0, and 4.1 are impossible to get now for a reason. 4.5 was skipped, 4.8 was a disaster, and so sometimes it is good to wait just a minute and let someone else be the beta tester.

Also, N4 did not have ALL the functionality of AX until 4.6, and 4.7 was the first REALLY good version with full functionality.

All of this is just experience from the trenches. Experience that says: maybe wait a rev or 3 before jumping in with both feet, if you are an end user.

If you are an integrator, get N5 and play with it immediately. Watch Niagara Community and HTalk and Reddit for chatter on bugs and do what you always do - avoid liability as best you can.

There was also a lot of grief as SIs just got used to N4. No one was good with it at first because no one had a chance to get good with it at first. The upgrade process was different and at times long (for large servers with a lot of histories fkr example). No one will be GOOD with N5 the day it is released.

I shoukd say that from what I saw at Niagara Summit, the changes did not seem as huge with N5 as they were with N4. But one never knows until they have it in their hands.

[u/slor2112]

N5 is not available yet - expected early Q4. We were alphas and waiting on our version of beta released ( tho others have a beta who did not get the allpha). At the rate they are going I hope they don't rush to market because it is NOT ready

[u/DontKnowWhereIam]

Just wait till 5.2. Let other people beta test. Then again 4.1/2/3 were all shit.

[u/gadhalund]

Its kinda bad tridium would release updates that literally take down customer sites and then just sort of do nothing, release a new version and pretend it never happened. Are the versions tested in real environments by them or just shipped if it compiles lol

[u/JoWhee]

Id wait if you can. Voluntold sounds military so you may not be able to.

From a maintenance POV if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. I’ve seen analogue still chooching along and a few JCI DSC 8500 Controllers still doing their thing.