I’ve been having a few intermittent issues with my ZW090-A so I thought I would look at doing a firmware update and got completely confused.
I had the Gen5 and about 18 months ago it started having issues and I bought a new Gen5+ and I remember going through the motions of backing up the Gen5 and restoring to the Gen5+.
Here’s what is confusing me. My Z-Wave JS shows this as ZW090, not ZW090-A which I confirmed is what I got from Amazon in May of 2022. Is that typical? Does anyone else have Z-Wave JS showing theirs as ZW090-A?
It also says my Firmware is 1.2, which I remember upgrading when I got the stick, but I can’t find anything that says there is a 1.2 Firmware, but I do see a KB article on Aeotec about updating to 1.02 on Oct 14, 2023.
And in THAT link it talks about updating Gen5 to “the same firmware Z-Stick Gen5+ uses”.
My Z-Wave JS should be at the latest:
zwave-js-ui: 9.3.2
zwave-js: 12.3.0
And even the debug in Z-Wave JS doesn’t mention the fact that this is Gen5+. The back of my stick does indicate that my stick is, indeed, a ZW090-A.
So, what is the latest firmware for this thing and where do you find it? I could just be overly cautious, perhaps it’s another issue like the fact it’s running on a VMWare VM and that’s causing issues or that my extension cable has gone bad, but I figure I can work through those systematically after refreshing the stick.
In case it matters, the reason for all of this is recently having an issue where my Z-Wave doesn’t respond because “queue is full” (so I shut everything down, unplugged the Z-Stick and plugged it back in and restarted - this fixed that) but then today I get “Network unavailable” and saw my stick was not connected in HA, and a simple restart of Z-Wave JS resolved the problem. So I’m just trying to get ahead of any possible issue.
The -A is the region indicator. It’s not used in the product name because 1) all regions are the same product anyways, 2) ZJS doesn’t differentiate it based on region, but they have the same identifier.
Well that’s confusing as heck! So “1.2” aka “1.02” is the latest firmware for this then and there’s no sense chasing down a firmware update that doesn’t exist then?
Updated with a Win10 flasher about 2 years ago (I remember it was a painful process!)
HASS shows the generic product name
ZW090 by AEON Labs
Firmware: 1.2
I notice HASS now has an interesting UPDATE button, suggesting you might be able to flash the device directly with a firmware file.
I’ve also seen zero-padding of version numbers in Zigbee (e.g. ZHA with IKEA remotes) which is equally confusing as this Z-Wave device.
The only issues I’ve had with Z-Wave have been not excluding dead / reset devices presumably causing the coordinator to lock waiting for a timeout of about 120S. The previous RazBerry coordinator was particularly prone to this, until it also received a firmware update.
Well, something is definitely up with my Z-Wave all of the sudden. I unplugged, rebooted and replugged and it was fine for exactly one day, now the queue is full again and nothing works until I unplug and restart Z-Wave JS. Very annoying. I’m replacing the stick and the cable and fingers crossed. I’m also going to start looking for another controller, two failures in 18 months with as many devices as I have doesn’t really give me confidence in Aeotec sticks any longer.
Everything was perfectly fine for 18 months, I really don’t imagine a cable that hasn’t been touched magically went bad.
I haven’t seen the video. The problem is that the location of where it is I need more than 0.5m to clear it from other equipment. I may end up trying a PoE Z-Wave adapter but I then have to re-pair every device. I have a new USB extension and Z-Stick coming, but if those don’t seem to help then I’ll see if a shorter cable might do the trick, thanks for the recommendation.
As I had mentioned, it’s worked without any major issues for quite some time and no new equipment has been installed recently that I can attribute to interference so I don’t know if something has just failed or if there is suddenly more interference. It could even be the 11.x release of HA for all I know, as I put off updating that for a while and this issue has cropped up since then.
HA 10.x brought in zwavejs 12.x which has been causing a lot of problems for a lot of folks. I’m running on gen5 stick on zwavejs 11.14.3 and am staying there until I’m satisfied that 12.x is solid.
Post a zwave debug log file, leading up to the lockup. I’d like to see what is happening prior to the failure.
With the new diag sensors for RSSI and RTT in HA 9.x and the updated network map in zwavejsui - you are able to get a lot of insight into what is happening in the network. The mesh topology changes. RF noise is a real problem. As an example, when the water heater goes on - the signal strength of the smart plug it’s plugged into changes dramatically - which causes the plug to look for a new route. Take a look at these things. Could be no more complicated than a failing device or a device that is spamming your network.
It doesn’t hit ZWave as badly as that video shows for Zigbee and Thread…
but it can absolutely still hammer a ZWave coordinator. (noisy data line between the coordinator and your install on the USB bus itself) So I still always recommend an extension or preferably a USB2 powered hub @CO_4X4 because at worst it doesn’t hurt.
Did those Sigma Designs ZIPR PoE remote Z-Wave coordinators ever get the API released? Last I’d heard (and it was some time ago…) they were closed-source commercial…
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