Firefly Vegatouch Mira

About the same time I purchased the Coach Proxy device to remotely control our coach, I also purchased a Firefly Vegatouch Mira device, that does much the same thing.

They each have pros and cons; the Mira device interfaces with an actual iOS app, with a more attractive UI, whereas the Coach Proxy has a local web interface. The Mira device communicates via Bluetooth, so is local to the coach, whereas Coach Proxy uses Wi-Fi, so can be accessed remotely — but the Wi-Fi connection can be less reliable.

The features are a bit different, too, e.g. the Mira app can rearrange the home screen a little, but Coach Proxy has presets to quickly restore a state.

And Mira was from a commercial company, vs a hobbyist project for Coach Proxy.

So, having both seemed like the best of both worlds.

However, the experience with Mira wasn’t as seamless as I’d like.

But first, installation of the hardware. The hardware component is a small box, about the size of a deck of cards, with a port for the Spyder multiplex network of the coach. It just needed to be plugged in anywhere on the coach. I happened to have a spare port behind the fridge, accessible via a panel outside (you can see more pics of this area in my Spyder shades issue post). So I connected it there; the orange cable leads to the device:

Panel behind fridge

A closer look:

Vegatouch device

To enable the app, one long-presses on the coach floorplan option in the main Spyder panel (which I had previously upgraded), to reveal a secret coach models screen, which includes a button to enable the mobile app, amongst other options:

Coach settings

Once that is done, a Mobile App button appears in the settings:

Mobile app button

The Mobile App settings, before connecting the device:

Mobile app settings

After installing the Vegatouch Mira app, it installed an update:

Installing update

But the app mis-identified our coach as an Allegro Open Road?! That’s not right:

Allegro Open Road?!

Of course, with it misidentifying the coach, most of the controls were wrong, and didn’t work. I tried re-installing the config, to no avail:

Installing update

I spent several months emailing the relevant person at Firefly every week, trying to get a fix. That was very frustrating, as he repeatedly said they were working on it, with no progress. I somehow managed to get the app to show a screen to choose a different floorplan, but the code I got from Firefly to choose the right one didn’t work. I eventually asked for a refund, and nothing happened on that either.

But I kept trying. After power cycling the entire coach for another reason, I managed to get that floorplan screen to appear again, and this time the code worked; I was finally able to set it to the correct model:

Bus settings

Yay!

Though it still isn’t perfect. Several of the pages aren’t quite right, e.g. on the home screen it shows LPG, which our coach doesn’t have, and the shade master and entry door lock controls don’t work:

 

Home page

The Lights page seems to work:

Lights page

But nothing on the Climate page works — our coach doesn’t have Spyder-controlled climate, so that isn’t surprising, though the Aqua-Hot controls should work, but don’t:

Climate page

On the Cockpit Shades page, nothing works:

Shades page

And on the Coach Shades page, the master and driver side don’t work, and the passenger side is reversed (goes down when pressing up):

Shades page

The Power pages are also mostly non-functional:

Power page

Power page

Power page

Power page

So after all that time, the app is still a little useless, though slightly better than it was before. The features that do work, like the tank levels and lights, are enough to justify keeping the app and device, though I wish more of the features worked correctly. I will likely continue using Coach Proxy most of the time, but for occasions when that is offline (due to Wi-Fi issues), having Mira as an alternative could be useful.

I would not recommend Mira for other owners of 2017-era coaches; Coach Proxy works much better. On more recent coaches, it might be more satisfactory. But I hold out hope that Firefly will improve the app, and maybe eventually fix those issues.