I would need one of these with the older firmware on loan to see what's going on here.
OK I should probably do it. Send me your mailing address privately pls.
Edit: @mike.maxwell, dropped in the mail to you earlier today. LMK and TIA
I have three of these devices. I did not have much luck controlling them with Smartthings. I'm away for long periods and whenever I return, Smartthings was unable to control them. So I've been controller them via Bluetooth in recent years.
I'm in the process of moving to HE and last night I thought I'll try connecting one of the Axis gear controllers. At first, I had difficulty pairing it with the HE. I eventually figured out that despite resetting the Axis gear, it would still connect to the Smartthings hub (which is still alive) after a reset. Or at least, it would prevent the Axis from connecting to the HE. Once I had deleted the Axis in Smartthings, it paired to the HE. At first, it was recognized as a "Device" and although is showed the status of the shades, I was unable to control it. After removing it from the HE, I paired it again. This time it showed up as a Generic Zigbee Shade and I was able to control it.
More or less at the time I was doing this, I noticed an update was available for the HE, and in the update notes, there was a reference to an Axis Gear firmware update.
After updating the HE hub, I went to the Gear driver, and low and behold, it updated the firmware of the Gear. It took the best part of 10 to 15 minutes (fortunately I was keeping an eye on the logs, else I would not have noticed an update was taking place).
I did not notice any improvement, but it is now 12 hours later and all seems to be fine with communications between the HE and A-Gear. I'll probably tackle the other two controllers over the weekend.
I started using Sharptools for my Dashboards and so far, I'm very pleased with it. However, the Axis Gear doesn't show up in Shartptools. I'll enquire over in the Sharptools forum what can be done to add the Axis Gear as a device in Sharptools.
I'll report back if I experience any issues with the Gear. I hope @mluck 's luck will turn soon. Automating one's shades/blinds should be one of the first things one should be able to do. That has, unfortunately, remained a very expensive exercise for the most part and causes lots of frustration if the devices one purchased for this purpose, don't work.
Edit: Corrected incorrect reference to Z-wave.
You may be able to manually authorize the device if it doesn't show up in one of the main authorization lists:
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Thank you, that worked like a charm.
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Really? Maybe you mean âGeneric Zigbee Shadeâ?
Sorry, it was very late. I meant to say zigbee.
Quick update in case others are experiencing similar problems with Axis Gears.
After the RYSE (fka Axis) folks provided Hubitat with the firmware update, @mike.maxwell was gracious enough to make it available in the HE eco-system so that we could run a firmware update command from the device details page. Which I did. Except it kept erroring out.
After reporting this to RYSE, rather than fixing the firmware update, they offered to do a bench upgrade of the hardware themselves. So I literally just mailed them a box of a dozen of the main motor units at their expense. If all goes well, they will upgrade the firmware in their lab, and send the units back to me.
Unfortunately, the solve doesnât scale, but I have to give them credit for sticking by me. Otherwise Iâd have a dozen zigbee shade controllers in the garbage.
Hopefully Iâll have an update for everyone soon.
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Eureka, I finally have a successful outcome to report. The folks at RYSE graciously took all twelve of my Axis Gears back and did a firmware upgrade at their bench and sent the units back to me. They paired up with HE immediately and with zero fuss. A huge thank you to @mike.maxwell for going above and beyond the call. Thank you, Mike. Seriously.
Everything is working now.
Well, almost everything. I noticed the Shade dashboard tile doesn't correctly reflect the position of the shades--in either the slider or via the template color. I'm guessing it's because the tile is a visualization of the Level attribute, not Position. But I don't know for sure. My use-case is simple. I'd like members of our family to be able to control the shade position (individually or via the group devices I've set up).
Any ideas?
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Hey mluck!
So I find myself in your (old) shoes here with a first gen Gear that I'm finally getting around to adding to my system (albeit HAOS). I, too, have the old 01000000 firmware (as reported by STHub and in HAOS). But in my case, Axis/Ryse are kind of being dicks. Support won't send me the FW and will ONLY provide any further support when connecting to SmartThings hubs. Forget the fact that Zigbee is a standard!
I've referenced this thread to them, which they don't seem to care about at all. So they won't provide the FW update; they also suggested that if I could get the FW to Samsung, they could update it, but they thought that was less likely, so they shrugged off any possible solution.
I can get it in HAOS as a shade and control it with no problem. The problem is that it drops off the network and won't wake up. It's as if it thinks it's a battery-driven device, so it shuts down the Zigbee radio. AFAIK battery powered end devices turn off unless there is data to send. But these need to receive commands at any moment. As I define things, that's a firmware bug.
My device is way past its warranty period, so I don't know the concern with me trying to update the FW through HAOS.
Any advice?
Hubitat already has the FW, if you are using the generic zigbee shade driver, just hit the update firmware button.
Probably not helpful advice.
They clearly are trying to sunset the Axis generation of products and want to put all their energy into RYSE, their new product generation. Viewed from this macro perspective, their behavior is sensible, if nonetheless frustrating.
How many Axis units do you have? I have like a dozen and appealed to their business sense (big customer representing significant revenue) and tried to be genuinely appreciative. Their customer support folks clearly just follow policy but if you can get directly to the engineers, they can exercise more discretion it appears. It also helped that I went through my stuff earlier when Ryse hadnât quite been released so they still were âtryingâ with Axis.
I did also find that their firmware files were useless. @mike.maxwell, Hubitat Zigbee master, was overly gracious in taking their firmware file, creating a generic Zigbee shade driver, and creating a capability to upgrade the firmware. But it never worked on Axisâ oldest devices. In the end, I had to mail all my old devices to Axis, and they bench-upgraded every individual device manually. Iâm sure they donât want to do that at scale, but maybe you could try.
Hope this context helps, but not sure it does. 
Yeah, no luck on getting them to do anything. I have mine working, and I can control it as I want. But I suspect that the original FW defined the device as a sleepy end device. The damn thing goes to sleep and drops off the network. Power cycling is the only remedy.
Support's recommendation is that I go and buy a SmartThings hub. Which I did, and I got it paired up. I wondered if the older FW would behave the same way on the ST Hub. But, the SOB works reliably on it FFS!
So, Samsung is doing something in their system that is clearly off Zigbee spec that manages to keep this thing from sleeping, or it knows some special command that it can send to wake it up. There are two endpoints reporting in the device, 1 and 196. I just don't know if that makes any difference or if there is anything I can use there.
My current workaround for this quirk is moving the blinds 1%, either up or down, every hour. This, so far, has been keeping the damn thing awake so that the automations can do their thing in the morning and evening. If there were something else I could automate instead of a movement, that would be better, as it does make noise during the night. Light sleepers would not be happy.
This, of course, is solely down to two factors. One, I won't let it beat me and two, I'll be replacing this with Ikea's later on down the road after our home renovation. The current window in the bedroom is too large for Ikea models to replace at the moment.
Thx for the reply!
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Do you know who I might contact to see if I can get a copy of it? I'm not on Hubitat, so I can't get that pulled down.
I think what @sidjohn1 is saying is that if you switch your device to the Generic Zigbee Shade driver, and then click the update firmware button, then the fw file will attempt to upgrade.
This is exactly what I did with the help of @mike.maxwell and what I discovered was that the oldest of their devices (the ones that I had and presumably same for you) were not firmware upgradable.
That said, I think Mike would have the raw file if there's some reason you want to try something different with it.
You may need to buy a hubitat hub to get the zigbee update. Itâs not uncommon for companies consider their FW to be intellectual property and will not release it directly to end users. I would not be surprised if there were NDAâs involved to allow hubitat to provide the update.
If the AXIS gear works well on a Smartthings hub⌠which has been in my experence and works well on hubitat hub⌠which is also my experence⌠the drop off issue maybe your HAOS HW. Either way hubitat has the FW. Come on over for the FW and stay for the stability 
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