Sent an email to ZooZ support asking about the issue with their Z-Wave stick and random hangs in Home Assistant. I haven’t seen the issue but i’ve only had it running 2 days with 2 devices. But I was curious what the issue was.
Here is their response
Hi Sam,
Thank you for reaching out!
The current 7.19 SDK released by Silicon Labs earlier this year may present controller lock-up issues but only in very particular circumstances. In some instances, the symptoms described may also be related to the Home Assistant / Z-Wave JS software set-up. With a DIY set-up including third party hardware and software, there are many factors that can cause issues. The particular lock-up problem is not guaranteed to be present for every controller using this SDK version and it seems to appear in edge cases only.
Have you reported the issue on the Home Assistant support forums? Since this is an open source platform, it doesn’t come with any type of dedicated tech support. Instead, their developers asked us to refer customers to the community forums for help and to report issues on GitHub and Discord. Their developers can usually properly diagnose the root cause by examining the logs as well.
The firmware updates for our Z-Wave sticks are developed and provided by Silicon Labs, while we are working closely with their team to make sure that functionality issues are addressed in a timely manner. Silicon Labs is aware of the current issues with the SDK and their whole team is focused on providing a final fix in the upcoming SDK release. We expect it to be ready in the next few weeks.
Once new firmware is available, we’ll receive a file specific for our hardware and have it available in our firmware repository.
We will reach out as soon as the new firmware is released.
Best,
Sara
Zooz Support Team
To Which I responded back
Thank you Sara for the quick response. However, I am confused by the message as it reads
We released 7.19, it has issues of locking up.
Home assistant could also be a part of it, 3rd party software can cause issues
Open source doesn’t have tech support, ask their forum.
The firmware for the zoom product is written by a 3rd party (see above dig at 3rd party)
Silicon Labs is aware of an issue, and are working on it. Is ZooZ doing anything to support this?
So my question is this. Since a firmware released is being working on by your 3rd party, why mention about HomeAssistant or open-source, etc?
Can you share the bug page and the testing that has been done? I’d like to read about the conditions
When I asked about their 3rd part testing or use cases, I received this.
Blockquote
We do not have any details regarding the edge cases here, as all testing was done by
Silicon Labs internally.
We will reach out as soon as an update is available.
Pleased with their response time to queries. Originally not so pelased with the deflection to 3rd party and open source as the issue meanwhile they defer to their 3rd party developer. Sharing here in case anyone else is tracking
Thankfully, I’m not seeing any issues and the Z00Z stick worked immediately in HA and paired with my sensors. Really happy with it
Too bad they didn’t provide or know the possible bug ID number. If it’s due to
1210023 FUNC_ID_ZW_SEND_TEST_FRAME caused the controller SerialAPI NCP to become unresponsive.
Then that was fixed in 7.21.0 which appears to have been released into general avalibility on Dec 13. I’m going to guess it’s likely the known issue
1227385 The 700/800 controller can lock itself up. The controller is not able to send acknowledgements and the data transmitted is corrupted
Which appears to still be a known issue in 7.21.0.
I guess someone could try the 7.21.0 generic firmware from siliconlabs to see if it that version still has problems, though it’d be missing any firmware customizations Zooz makes for their zst39 (if they make any).
It looks like this issue is no longer mentioned in the recently released SDK 7.20.3.0. Hopefully it’s fixed?
Odd it’s not mentioned in the “Fixed” category though
Are we ever going to get a firmware update? I’ve had to setup a automation to power cycle the stick every time it goes to “jammed”. It locks up multiple times per day sometimes back to back its jammed 400 times in 2 months.
I posted this in another thread, but just for those following here: I received an email last night from Zooz saying that Silicon Labs had just released 7.22.1.0 and Zooz now has a version 1.5 that supposedly fixes this issue. In the SiLabs release notes, it previously showed issue number 1227385 as “The 700/800 controller can lock itself up. The controller is not able to send acknowledgements and the data transmitted is corrupted”. Now in these new release notes, that issue is listed as “While the controller stability has been greatly improved in Z-Wave Classic, the workaround implementation is still recommended on the host side”. Not sure why they changed the wording, nor do I understand why that is still listed under known issues if it is “fixed”. However, under the list of fixed issues, you can find number 1321606 which is “Fixed an issue causing a controller to be locked in a constant beaming pattern. The behavior was caused by an incorrect configuration entered in the controller NVM” which sounds like the issue we were all seeing.
Oddly enough, while you can download the 1.5 firmware from Zooz here and this is the actual file link. Interestingly, their own release notes do not yet list the 1.5 version or the changes. Still it’s something. Anyone wanna roll the dice and update to see if it is fixed??