I've got a C7 due to arrive tomorrow and I'm going to migrate everything across to it from a C4.
The C4 is UK version currently running a separate Zigbee only USB stick (supplied by Hubitat, but not the originally supplied joint Zigbee/Zwave one) . I have no Zwave devices on the C4 currently.
As I understand it I have 2 options:
I can plug in my existing Zigbee stick using an OTG cable to the C7, restore a backup from the C4 and everything should work immediately.
I can use the C7 internal Zigbee radio but then would have to reset and rediscover each Zigbee device, where they would be found as existing devices and slotted straight back in to the system.
Presuming I have got the above correct, I would prefer option 1 as firstly it is easier, and secondly I actually prefer having the radio on a lead away from the unit as it is in a comms cupboard with quite a bit of other gear. There is nothing in the comms cupboard that "should" interfere but it feels better to get the radio out of the way a bit.
So really my question is are there any technical advantages to using the internal Zigbee over the USB stick? I know the upcoming Hub Protection Service only works with internal radios but it seems to me that having the external stick gives backup advantages too as, providing the stick itself doesn't fail, it will always make switching from one hub to another easier.
I went down your option 2 route as I didn't need to have the zigbee radio on a 'lead'.
I believe, and I'm not 100% sure, that plugging the zigbee radio into the USB will not disable the internal zigbee radio which means it cannot be done.
I loaded my C3's backup onto the C7 and just went round all my zigbee devices resetting them. As you say they were discovered as an existing device and started to work OK in all the rules etc.
I don't know how many you have but for me it didn't take that long. Maybe 1-2 hours max. All mine were pretty accessible though.
I did try it with the z-wave stick when I first got the C7, I think, it was a while ago now, and z-wave just died. So that didn't work.
Don't think I tried the zigbee stick TBH but it's just something that is in the back of my mind about not being able to use the zigbee stick.
What you can do is just download a backup from the C-4 then restore it to the C-7. Set your C-7 in inclusion mode and go around and start pairing your zigbee devices and they should just start showing up again as they were. No rule adjustments etc needed.
Thats what I did when moving from the C-4 (US with combo stick) to a C-5 (no stick).
Ah sorry - I think you can use an OTG cable and it would override. In the U.S. the stick is a combo stick (Nortek) so would handle both Zigbee and Z-Wave.
That's a good point. I've carried on searching and haven't found anything about external Radios via OTG cable for the C7 yet. I would like to still have the option to use the internal Zwave so wouldn't want to disable that with my external Zigbee.
Maybe someone from Hubitat will confirm. If not I guess I can be the guinea pig and try it out and see what happens.
No the stack is exactly the same. I would hope that the internal radio is a later version that at some point could be updated to a zigbee 3.0 stack but I have no evidence of that. The only advantage would be of the HE system, my hub rarely needed to be rebooted with the C4 but it did happen more than it should. I haven't seen that so far with the C7, so its much more robust in my house.
The C7 arrived nice and early today so I've had most of the morning to set it up.
I initially tried with the OTG cable and the Zigbee stick from the C4 but it didn't seem to like it. I was working on the clean C7 prior to doing the C4 file restore but noticed that the Zigbee channel had defaulted to 11. My C4 was on 15 so I thought I'd change that first before doing the restore. Maybe that was a mistake because it seemed to lock up the hub. I waited 15 minutes but the change channel screen was still showing with the timing wheel running and at that point I chickened out. Maybe it was because there were no devices set up or maybe if I'd restored the backup file first it would have picked up the correct channel from the stick data, but I decided not to push my luck any more and just to run the C7 as intended using the internal radios.
So, after a restart, I restored the backup file from the C4 and then spent the rest of the morning going round resetting and re-discovering my devices. They all came up as exisitng devices.
I use Node Red for my rules and I was a bit concerned I'd have to go round every device node in that updating. But, with the Maker API settings restored from the backup to the C7, all I had to do in Node Red was update the Node Confguration IP to the new C7 Hub in the Hubitat Node and everything is working well.
I'm still intrigued as to whether the C7 should have worked with the external Zigbee, but it wasn't as much work as I thought it might be, and it kept me occupied for a few hours of lockdown!
Glad to hear it's working and thanks for the update. I too am using Node-RED and found it very easy to reconfigure after the migration. I am using one of my old C-4s with the stick removed as a "cloud apps / network devices" hub.
Although a lot of my LAN stuff is connected directly to Node Red (Iotawatt, Harmony Hub, Sonos) I do use the Chromecast beta in Hubitat for some TTS on Google Minis, so will start off with that. I have discovered that however many hubs you buy as "backups", you always end up using them for something!
My original setup was 2 C-4's (main floor/upstairs) and a C-5 (cloud). After migration I have a C-4 for cloud/net stuff, a C-5 for zigbee devices and a C-7 for Z-wave.
The Alexa Skill on HE works really well for light control - am now using HubMesh to share some sengled bulbs on my C-5 to the C-4 and then share with Amazon. I am also using Alexa on NR as well to do other more sophisticated stuff.
