Sine Systems RFC-1/B Remote Control Bug
You should check the date on your RFC-1/B.
A bug has been discovered in the hardware, which can cause the calendar to roll over to the wrong year. Some report on that on January 1st it rolled back to 2000. Other reports have seen some other dates.
SHORT STORY: Sine Systems says to just go ahead and reset the date – and relax, everything will be OK.
Longer story and explanation: The issue is mostly of concern to those people using the remote control to change power/pattern, or initiate some other action. According to Sine Systems, the problem is caused by two routines that can, under unpredictable conditions, “step” on each other, and output the wrong year. (Each routine apparently tries to utilize the same tiny piece of scratch memory in the unit, and sometimes – but not always – causes the rollover problem.)
Since the Sine RFC-1/B is only using the calendar to calculate leap years, it does not matter if the unit thinks it is 2010 or 1910. Once you reset the year, everything is fine, all the way to the year 2100.
Sine says this will be fixed in the upcoming V6 software, although no date has been set for its release. In the meantime, if a user is really bugged about this minor issue, Sine will provide an update chip – but they warn that this will reprogram the RFC-1/B back to factory defaults, and is probably cause more work than just changing the year and moving on.