HUSBZB-1 replacement w/50 devices - upgrade firmware + backup, or build from scratch?

I’m about to pull the trigger on replacing my HUSBZB-1 stick with an Aeotec Z-Stick 7. I’ve been studying up on the process for upgrading the firmware on the HUSBZB-1 in order to be able to take NVM backups. It’s a daunting process to say the least.

My network isn’t huge, but isn’t small either, 50 devices, mostly door/window sensors, a few door locks and light switches. I’m tempted to forego the firmware update and just rebuild the network from scratch on the Z-Stick. Assuming I keep the entity names the same, this should be do-able, right? It’s just a matter of going through the pain of unpairing/pairing each device?

What would you do?

IMO, I think it’s worth waiting for the 800 series sticks (and zwaveJS support for them) if you’ve not got the new stick already.

I didn’t bother with the backups for my upgrade to a 700-series, but at the time, I was still on the legacy OZW integration. What I did was keep OZW and ZwaveJS running in parallel, with the new stick on ZwaveJS. Most of my switches are in double gang boxes next to a buddy, so I just excluded one switch from the old stick and included it on the new stick one device in each place with two switches to get the mesh going, and from there worked my way inward from the edges to transferring things over. It worked well to keep a mesh working for both sticks and minimized disruption for the rest of the household.

Even with the backup as an option, I’d probably have gone this way because I wanted to enable S2 on everything that supported it. I don’t think you’ll likely have the option of having two meshes in concert, so you’ll have to work faster to minimize household disruption, but start from the edges so you don’t wind up with devices out of range of your exclusion.

If you keep the same entity names (or just rename to match after the fact) you should be in good shape on the H-A side to pick up quickly.

Well, it’s been an interesting/frustrating couple of days. I decided to go through the firmware upgrade on my HUSBZB-1 stick so that I could do the NVM backup/restore. I also upgraded the Z-Stick 7 to FW 7.19.2. The upgrade of both sticks was actually fairly simple, and the migration using zWaveJS couldn’t have been easier. Took about an hour and I was up and running on the Z-Stick 7.

That’s where the warm fuzzies stopped.

I did a full network heal on the new stick, just for good measure. It took a while, as expected, and I had to wake up a few devices, but the heal was successful. Everything was great, went to bed.

Woke up the next morning to find several devices showing as “dead”, in spite of the ping automation that I’ve had running for the past year. Even pinging them manually through the zWaveJS console wouldn’t bring them back to life. I had to go physically wake up each dead device to bring it back. Not cool.

Yesterday, I updated zWaveJS UI to version 1.10.0, and about half of my devices dropped dead, and no amount of pinging or physical waking would bring them back. Very not cool.

WITHOUT CHANGING ANYTHING ELSE, I switched back to the HUSBZB-1 stick, and all devices showed up online and alive. Now, 24 hours later, they’re all still alive, and I’ve not seen a dropped node.

I think I’m gonna put the Z-Stick 7 back in the box and wait for 800 series support in zWaveJS.