It wont make any difference.
Thank you for that. Do you know if it would make a difference in the direction the logo is pointing? (That is the face that used to be to top)? I’m asking as most of my switches will be roughly on a line north and south of the hub. I live in a one floor condo so I don’t have to worry about it going up or down to another story.
As per the picture from Dana, the emission zone looks like a donut, the direction the unit faces won’t make any noticeable difference.
Unlike the flat vs vertical orientation, which does.
Thanks
It seems as though 7.17.1 as dramatically improved the Zwave network , especially on group lighting scenes where 5+ lights are turned on/off at once.
Has anyone played with the metering in larger Group Scenes yet? I know metering was added to Group Scenes some time ago to try to give the Zwave network time to pass the commands and acknowledgments back and forth but wondering if anyone has found if it is necessary any longer after 7.17.1?
I have a client with a large house and many large groups to turn lights on/off that has always had problems. I cant just go there and check easily but I can remote in and makes changes so that is the reason for my question.
@bcopeland ?
Another thing that can help after major mesh changes (like moving the hub) is going to each sleepy device and waking it up as well as activating any device with a physical switch/button so that the devices can discover if they have bad routes.
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I did testing with 30 devices and no metering.. Sent 6,000 commands and received 6,000 state updates with no dropped commands.
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Music to my ears. 10's of hours spent over the last 2 years on C7 deployments with ghost nodes and ack issues. Cant believe it took silicon graphics that long to fix the issue but happy they did.
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I tried hitting things pretty hard with a scene and no metering after the upgrade.
Most of the time, things seem to work far better (even with no metering). In testing just now, however, I was doing some "all off" and "all on" scenes--and on one ouf of maybe 4-5 tries, it only got about 1/2 of the devices set. Trying again after maybe 20-30 seconds, it really didn't do much better. I did a "refresh" on all the devices and tried again--and it seemed to behave that time.
So, at the moment, about the only outstanding issue I regularly have is my "Dual Controlled Dual Dimmer" Jasco outlet, where the FIRST (-1) device is not reporting updated status properly. It takes an explicit refresh of that device to trigger that to report back (it appears that a "refresh" of the parent device also works--but I can't find a way to call the parent's refresh from an RM rule). I suspect this could be a "race" condition in the driver.
@bcopeland
My business partner has a good question. What would the results have been pre- 7.17.1? There is no context to the numbers until we understand the rough numbers before the new firmware. This would give us a better idea of what the improvement actually is.
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Glad I found this thread. Had no idea I should be updating the Z-Wave firmware along with the Hubitat update. Z-Wave Firmware update went smooth - took about 10 mins.
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These releases are generally very very rare. AFAIK, there have been just two zwave firmware updates for the C7.
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In my experience the results would have been best case roughly half (or more) the devices would not respond (not turn on or off). Worst case the zwave radio has a meltdown and then nothing works until you power down the hub and unplug it, then reboot.
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It would be very helpful if the "System Messages" flag let people know that they need to do this update and contained a link to the Z-Wave Details page when the update is needed.
Given my own experience, and the huge improvement this brings, I'd say this is the "biggest deal" update since the C7 was released so it should be flagged.
I.e., this flag . . .
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Agree that it's important for folks to know about these updates and apply them. Particularly for users who aren't hanging out in this forum (presumably majority of HE users aren't here regularly) and don't see the HE staff release posts and other messaging here.
Probably hasn't been prioritized due to the tiny number of Z-Wave FW udpates to date, just two since the C7 was released. A limited resources question and HE has likely decided (to date) that their time is spent elsewhere fixing bugs/working on features.
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I think kind of begs the questions: "When should someone NOT update the zwave firmware?"
If this is something everyone should apply, why not just apply it automatically as part of the update process?
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Fear, uncertainty and doubt...
Probably the most important reason is that it takes a very long time, and comes with the caveat that if you power off at the wrong time you can brick the unit.
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If this is like previous updates, I'm guessing it will be a required/automatic update at some point, i.e., it will happen automatically as part of the hub/platform upgrade. They're just being cautious with it at this point. (Though if/when that happens, I'm guessing it would be 7.17.2, the actual GA release, which they now recommend over the "pre-certified" 7.17.1, so that's probably another reason it's not automatic at the moment.)
So ... eventually, no one will need to do anything at all, and they're just letting the more adventurous test it first. This time there just happened to not only not be any problems (it seems) but also a significant improvement for many. 
[EDIT: Nevermind, keeping them voluntary, it appears!]
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No… Z-Wave firmware updates will stay as an interactive process at the moment.. No immediate plans to background this process as a reboot at the wrong time (although this is a very short window in the whole process) can be detrimental..
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Isn't this also true for the hub software updates?
