Interesting. I wonder if others have found the same thing. May have to try that myself.
Were you able to restore NVM after this downgrade? I get an error about incompatible NVM versions when I try to do that after flashing 7.18.3.
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Backup and restore to the 800 series requires your 800 series have 7.19.3 and higher
Got it, so you went and rebuilt the network with the new firmware? Really want to avoid that.
Where can I check which firmware I have ?
If you are using Z-Wave JS UI, look at the main Node listing and find your controller stick, then look at the values in the FW column.
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In the Z-Wave JS UI control panel it will tell you in the firmware column. In the Z-Wave JS Integration it will tell you when you click on the device.
Thanks… 
it never occurred to me to move the JS page to the right .
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No worries - Its easy once you know how, and a total mystery until that point. Like about 90% of the topics in this forum!
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I have tried all three versions of the firmware, and I am sick to death of zwave issues with these SL controllers. However I am heavily invested in Zwave devices, so I am looking at alternative solutions. I like the Z-box, except I also have some Zigbee and WiFi devices.
Any thoughts or recommendations?
Use a ZWave controller based on the 500 series chip (like gen-5). Those don’t have the issues that the 700 controllers have.
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Just to maybe help others, although I don’t think this is really a fix, I assume it just makes the problem less likely to happen. I used a usb extension cable to plug in the zst39 and I have not had it unresponsive yet in the last 24 hours. The day before I did this it happened 5-6 times. Maybe most are already doing this since using an extension was already recommended, but I just setup HA and was holding off to see if it worked okay with out having a doggie hanging off the pi. Things seemed okay for the first day with non secure and S2 devices, but once I added my GoControl garage door openers things went bad. Those are S1 which I have read causes more messaging which probably explains why I hit the issue so much once they were on the Z-wave network. It also seemed more likely to hit after someone opened or closed one of the garage doors even without using HA. I assume from the open close messaging on the sensor.
Edit: I should also add, I also switch from the default Z-wave JS addon, to the UI version, although I doubt this made the difference since I did hit the unresponsive issue after making this switch but before trying the extension cable.
Edit 2: I am on 1.30 firmware.
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I had things working for a while after downgrading back to 7.19.3 with the ZST39, but then started getting controller unable to transmit errors.
ZST39 also has a 7.18.3 firmware version, which others have had luck with, but NVM upload doesn’t work, so no good for those who don’t want to rebuild everything.
I ended up reverting to a ZST10 700 series stick with 7.18.3 firmware, which does allow NVM upload (zwave-js will convert it for you), and also works with LR-mode devices (hidden feature I didn’t know about - although the range isn’t actually enough in my case - mesh non-LR works better). Now all is good again after ~30 mins. Hopefully this is the last swap for me.
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Has anyone tried firmware 7.22.0? I saw a post that it fixed this problem.
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From looking at the documentation this issue has not been fixed but it did look like the stability was improved.
You can find the latest Release Notes by looking here. This list is sorted by date so the document at the top is the newest. The release notes for the 7.22.0 firmware can be found here.
If you go to section 3.4 which is the Known Issues in This Release section it will show you the ID # for the known issues as well as a description and fix for the issue. 1227385 is the ID # of the issue for the controller locking itself up. If you want to keep up with this issue you can just hit CTRL+F and search for that number in the document.
Also you can download Zooz firmware updates from here. The 7.22.0 firmware is not available for the ZST39 yet. I think it took 2 months to get the 7.19.3 firmware so it might be a while before we get the 7.22.0 firmware.
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Thanks for the info. I have been banging my head against the wall thinking it was me, so was glad to find this thread. Appreciate the links to everything @cornellrwilliams.
I had upgraded my ZST39 to 7.22.0 and things went from bad to unusable. I’m within the return timeframe on the device so decided to try downgrading to 7.18.3. I wasted an inordinate amount of time downloading SI Labs garbage app - only to realize that PC Controller only works on Windows devices. What a horrible application.
Anyway, I was able to downgrade leveraging zwavejsui. Not sure if this decision will impact usability, but I’ll give it a few days and see how it goes. At this point I’m not sure if I should even be moving to a newer Zwave network. I’m currently trying to replace all switches in the house with newer 700/800 generation devices to get to a better Zwave experience. But at this point I’m thinking Zigbee may be the better route. Anyone have any thoughts? It seems like the history of ZW 700/800 has been pretty bad - and also that SI Labs seems to not be addressing the issues.
Just to update. I have had the issue hit a couple of times since adding the usb extension cable, but it is at least days between hitting instead of a few hours.
I have some 60 Zwave and some 15 Zigbee devices. My firmware of ZST39 is 7.19.
My Zwave network is more stable than my Zigbee network and my thought is rather to replace my Zigbee with more Zwave.
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Fellow victim here as well and I wish I saw this post prior to doing an update. After downgrading to the previous version all is well and was frustrating to say the least… woke up this morning and nothing was working.
Curious what version? As I mentioned a few posts up - I moved all the way back to 7.18.3. Curious if the 7.19 is the better place to be? So far - all is OK for me. I will get about 20-30 dropped RX on the controller in a given day, but for now I only have about 5 devices moved over. Don’t really want to migrate everything else and then have the network start to deteriorate.
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