PSA for Aeotec Z-Wave Device Users Looking to Upgrade FW (ZW095) Home Energy Monitor

Configuration Z-Wave
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I’ve been an HA user for over 3 years and have learned much of what I know on these forums. I recently ran into and issue and wanted to share to hopefully prevent others from making the same mistake I have.

I have several Aeotec/Aeon Z-Wave devices on my network and recently discovered the option to upgrade FW with ZWave-JS. I began upgrading the FW for my Smart Switches (v6) to the latest I found on the Aeotec website 1.7. It worked like a charm, maybe 3-5 minutes to load the FW, device restarted and came right up.

I then proceeded to upgrade my home energy monitor, HEM Gen5 (DW095) FW 1.35. When searching for the fw, I saw that there was post on Aeotec support site to submit ticket and include the details for your model. After completing that, I received the FW package within a day (v1.37).

Like my switches, I made sure the HEM had a single hop connection, really good stats and proceeded to upload the FW, took about 5m or to complete and then proceeded to reboot…but never came up. Scratching my head I began troubleshooting only to find that apparently I bricked the device. LED does not come on, not visible on the network, tried to exclude/include, reset, nothing…it’s just dead.

So I went back to the steps I followed and noticed that the only difference in process between my switches and the HEM was the fact that I renamed the FW file to end in .EXE per the instructions provided for almost all the Aeotec FW I’ve seen.

If you’re upgrading the FW through windows host using their tool, renaming the file allows you to launch the executable which runs the FW upgrade…for whatever reason when I did the FW upgrade for the switches I never renamed the file, so it was pushed via ZWave-JS as the “ZW096_Smart_Switch_6_US_V1_07.ex_” not the “ZW096_Smart_Switch_6_US_V1_07.exe” which is what the instructions dictate.

I’m not sure if pushing the FW via Zwave-JS with the .exe was the cause of the bricked HEM, but it’s the only difference in the process that I’ve followed.

So I hope this post serves two purposes, one confirm with others that have upgraded Aeotec devices OTA using Zwave-JS if they renamed the EXE files and second…just flash a warning that depending on the feedback here you need to cautious about renaming the FW files to prevent you from bricking your device like I did.

Hope someone finds this helpful. Best of luck!

Excerpt from Aeotec Support Website to Upgrade FW

  1. Note: Smart Switch 6 EU and AU firmware version V1.04 is the same as US firmware version V1.07.
  2. Unzip the firmware ZIP file and change the name of “Smart Switch 6_.ex_” to “Smart Switch 6_.exe”.
  3. Open the EXE file to load the user interface.
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I wanted to follow up on this since I was able to get my hands on a replacement HEM. I re-downloaded the FW files provided by Aeotec and after extracting found that the executable was already named with the .exe extension so there was no change on my part required. The only difference between the FW upgrade of the bricked HEM and the second one was that I placed the HEM close to the computer with the ZWave controller. Thankfully all went well and the upgrade was successful.

I went back to check the logs and did show that the original FW download on the bricked HEM did send all the packets across…so maybe something was corrupted over the air.

All this to say, if upgrading FW and you have the option to move the device close to the controller (even if there’s a solid connection between the two) don’t take any chances, move the device to upgrade close to the controller before starting the OTA upgrade.

Hope this helps others. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions.