Neat! I assume the chip just gets installed inside the driver, correct?
Yep, 3 screws and a simple replacement of the old chip.
Did the app exist back then? I'm just wondering why they had a slot for the RF chip in the driver if they didn't have an app to connect to.
No worries, Ecotech is a company that seems to constantly evolve and strive to keep up with current technology .
Their very 1st vortech used a dial and (I want to say) 2 buttons to cycle through the different modes and set the intensity. Although cutting edge for the time, pretty basic for today's standards.
Then they changed the look of the driver to what we see today, 3 buttons and a dial but a white housing instead of black. They had 2 price options wireless and non wireless. The wireless allowed multiple pumps to communicate with each other so that you can have them work together to achieve certain objectives (parent/child, sync/anti-sync/ecoback). The biggest draw for this feature was dialing in 2 pumps on either side of the tank to achieve a standing wave, again cutting edge for the time. Of course there were more practical purposes for wireless communication, but the shiny red ball at events was seeing a standing wave in a tank from across the room. This feature was called Wireless Ecosmart (wes) and that's where the green rf chip came from.
Afterwards, they continued to evolve by incorporating a centralized hub called Reeflink that piggy backed onto the RF chip that made it so that you can program and set schedules for all the ecotech products... radions, vectras and vortechs. Also Neptune Systems worked with them to incorporate a wireless module so that ecotech products can operate on the fusion platform, which was called WXM.
People seemed to complain about the distinct humm of the pump as it ramped up and down during operation, which led to the stealth chop Quiet Drive iteration that pretty much solved that issue. The Quiet Drive was met with a new look of what we see today, the black driver.
Currently, we're in the era of Mobius, which sort of replaced Reeflink and WXM, even though there are die hards out there that still use those platforms, most users prefer the app based Mobius platform.
And icing on the cake for Apex users, Neptune recently came out with a Mobius control module to incorporate the latest iteration of Ecotech and AI products onto the fusion platform, called MXM.
This is a brief history as I remember it. It may not be 100% accurate but darn there close.
