New Honeywell Ademco 6160rf keypad - Slower and No beep when pressing keys

I just upgraded from an older 6160 keypad to a brand new 6160rf (so I could add some wireless sensors). And I noticed an irritating new feature to th e firmware: the new 6160rf keypad does not consistently beep when you press a key.

The first thing we noticed about the new 6160rf keypad is that it is all-ar ound slower than my old 6150 and 6160 keypads. When you arm or disarm, the re is now a noticeable delay (2-5 seconds) before the keypad starts to beep on and off. The old keypads ALWAYS provided immediate beep feedback when arming or disarming. The delay is now so long that I can get completely ou t the door sometimes before I hear the keypad beeping.

I've noticed there are 2 scenarios when the keypad does not beep when press ing a key. If you enter your armed home, the keypad starts to beep on and off to remind you to enter your code. When you start pressing keys, the en try on-off beep quits beeping to give you beep feedback as you press each k ey.

1) On the old 6160 keypad, if you press a key while the keypad is beeping d ue to the entry, the keypad still beeped (again) whenever you pressed the f irst key (to provide feedback that the key had been pressed). On the new 6 160rf keypad, the panel does not beep when you press the first disarm code key (because it is already beeping). So on the new keypad, it may or may n ot beep when you press the first key to disarm. Therefore you get no feedb ack whether the first key was successfully seen. This has already caused m e to set off the alarm twice (when the first key was not successfully seen by the control panel).

2) On both the old and new keypads, if you make a mistake entering your cod e, the keypad starts beeping on and off again after 15 seconds (to tell you it is still armed). On the new 6160rf, if you press keys after the 15 sec ond time out, it does not beep as you press any keys, so you get no key fee dback (it just keeps beeping on and off). It kind of makes you freak out b ecause it seems the keypad is dead, however it is alive but not giving any key beep feedback. My old 6150 acted like this and now the new 6160rf acts like this, however my old 6160 always beeped when keys were pressed - even after the first 15 second silent period expired.

All in all, its disappointing that the new firmware has 'bugs' and is so mu ch slower even though the keypad is many years newer. I guess saving a few cents on a slower processor is more important than the user experience. Th anks, Honeywell...

Reply to
K W
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After playing with this some more, I finally realized that the solution to my problem (was the first key actually seen?) is to simply keep pressing th e first key of my code until I hear the beep feedback, then continue on wit h the rest of the digits. This gets around the fact that the new 6160rf pa nel may or may not beep when you enter the first key. Since it silences th e on/off beep on the second key press (for 15 seconds), if you just keep pr essing the first key until you get feedback, then you'll know if the key wa s seen.

Simple fix, but still does not fix the problem that the new keypad is just plain slower than the old ones.

Reply to
K W

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