We’ve just released TPMS controller firmware 1.10.1, and it fixes a genuinely annoying bug: under the right circumstances, the controller could lose track of its own sensors and stop hearing them entirely. If that’s happened to you, there’s a specific thing you need to do — and it isn’t obvious, so please read on. We’ve also got news on the StickFree front, and a first hint at something we’re building that has nothing to do with motorcycles.

The Bug: When the Controller Goes Deaf

A customer wrote in recently with a problem that had him understandably frustrated. His pressure readings were off, so he updated the app, updated his firmware, and went to recalibrate — and after that, the controller simply stopped seeing his sensors. A number would flash up once and then nothing. He tried riding it. He tried unscrewing and re-seating the sensors. Nothing worked.

Nothing was going to work, and that’s on us.

Here’s the mechanism. Your controller doesn’t listen to every tire sensor in the parking lot — it listens only to the two specific sensors it has paired with, and it filters everything else out at the radio level. That’s deliberate: it’s what stops your bike from picking up the reading off the bike next to you at a rally.

The problem was in how the controller updated that pairing. When it swapped in a new sensor address, it removed the old one first and then added the new one. If anything went wrong in the gap between those two steps, the controller could end up listening for nothing at all — deaf to sensors that were sitting right there transmitting perfectly happily. And because the app could still see a normally-paired unit, nothing looked wrong from the outside.

Older versions of our phone app made this much more likely to bite, because they re-sent both sensor addresses every time you changed a setting. So something as innocuous as nudging a calibration value could kick the whole thing over.

Firmware 1.10.1 fixes this properly. The new address goes in before the old one comes out, so there is no window where the controller is listening for nothing. It also now skips the update entirely when the address hasn’t actually changed, which means it no longer churns at all when you adjust a calibration. And it refuses to accept an obviously invalid sensor address rather than dutifully saving it.

Important: The Update Alone Won’t Fix an Affected Unit

This is the part to get right, because otherwise you install the update, nothing changes, and you reasonably conclude we didn’t fix anything.

If your controller is currently not seeing its sensors, the bad pairing is saved in its memory. It survives the firmware update, and it survives any number of ignition cycles — which is exactly why riding the bike doesn’t help. The sensors have to be re-paired.

1. Update the phone app first (you want 1.3.2 or newer), then turn on accessory/ignition (keep it on) and let it update the controller to 1.10.1.
2. Tap each tire, then Change → Start discovery, and stand next to each wheel and re-seat the sensors so it re-learns them.
3. Ignition off, back on, reconnect, and check your readings.

Re-seating works here, even though it didn’t before, because during discovery it’s your phone doing the listening rather than the controller — so it finds the sensors no matter what state the controller has got itself into. Re-seating just wakes them up so they transmit.

One more thing that isn’t in the manual and probably should be: a reading that appears and then goes back to dashes after a couple of minutes parked up is completely normal. The sensors only transmit when the wheels are turning. They go quiet when the bike is sitting still, and that is not a fault.

Also in 1.10.1: Calibration That Fails Loudly

There was a second, quieter issue we found while we were in there.

If you pushed a calibration correction far enough in one direction, the value sent to your dash could overflow and wrap around — so instead of showing an obviously wrong high number, the dash would show a plausible-looking low one. That’s the worst kind of wrong: a bad reading that looks like a real reading.

The dash now pins at its maximum instead of wrapping. If a calibration is pushed too far, you’ll see something clearly implausible rather than something quietly misleading. The controller also now rejects nonsensical calibration values outright instead of storing them.

To get 1.10.1, make sure your phone app is on 1.3.2 or newer, then connect and let it walk you through the controller update. If anything about this doesn’t go the way you expect, get in touch — I’d genuinely rather hear about it.

StickFree Has Found Its People

Slightly unexpected news: the StickFree Yoke Fix has seen a real jump in orders recently, and it has quickly gone from a side project to something we’re restocking far more often than we planned for.

For anyone who hasn’t seen it — it’s a two-piece PETG-CF bearing housing that clamps around the shaft of a Turtle Beach VelocityOne Flight yoke and eliminates the sticking and binding that plagues the factory design. It’s completely reversible, needs no modification to your hardware, and takes about ten minutes and a Phillips screwdriver. The difference is most obvious exactly where it matters most, in the small precise inputs during a landing flare.

That it took off at all is entirely down to flight sim people telling other flight sim people. So: thank you. That’s not a market we went looking for — someone asked us whether we could fix their yoke, and it turned out we could.

Which brings me to a standing offer. If there’s something you use that’s let you down in an irritating, fixable way — a part that binds, a bracket that flexes, a design decision somebody clearly made on a Friday afternoon — tell us about it. Some of the best things we make started as one person’s complaint. We can’t build everything, and we’ll be honest with you when something isn’t a fit, but we read every one. Send it our way or email contact@debyltech.com.

Something New on the Bench: Thermolink

Last thing, and I’ll keep it deliberately brief because it’s early.

We’ve been spending evenings on a project we’re calling Thermolink — a smart thermostat controller for in-home heat pump and mini-split systems. The short version of the motivation: plenty of these systems are perfectly good pieces of hardware saddled with a controller that can’t talk to anything else in your house, and replacing the whole system to get a better thermostat is an absurd proposition.

Right now this is oscilloscope-and-logic-analyser territory rather than anything you can buy, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise or put a date on it. But it’s real, it’s progressing, and it’s the first thing we’ve built that has nothing to do with a motorcycle or a flight sim.

More when there’s more to show.