C7 to C8 migration question

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Hi all,

Very quick and hopefully easy question, after following the migration from C7 to C8 what’s the best way to reuse the C7 in a mesh and if I’d like to test devices on the C7 before adding to the C8 (kinda like a testing ground) should I just reset the zwave radio after the migration and will all the devices try and reconnect once the hub is running again ?

Thanks

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Separate your WiFi/LAN integrations from your z-wave/Zigbee devices. If you have 3, put rules on yet a third device, otherwise, put your rules on the z-wave hub. I have found that LAN integrations can introduce long pauses to hub processing if there are issueC and parsing data from LAN based devices tend to be more CPU intensive, so outing the LAN devices on a separate hub speeds up overall performance on rules processing.

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Keep the C7 powered down at first. Once you are happy with the C8 setup and not going back, power up the C7 again and promptly reset both radios. Then use the diagnostic tool to do a Soft Reset. Once rebooted setup as a new hub. Resetting the radios should create a new ID, so the old hub will ignore any of the traffic from the migrated devices and have its own new mesh.

Even if you did not use Zigbee I would reset the radio just to be safe.

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Ah great that appears to be straight forward enough. How do devices know which hub they need to connect to ? I’m guessing MAC address or some station ID and if so will the C8 assume this same ID as well ?

Thanks.

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I was thinking that thank you. I was going to separate out a few services like HomeKit non-mission critical apps like that and just keep the C8 for device / rules etc. I think that should be good ?

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Its basically a special network ID and yes the new hub will assume that ID, then resetting the old hub will get it a new one. The devices just blast messages out with that network ID and the hub only reads the messages intended for it.

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Ahhh right so basically two hubs can hear the messages at the same time.

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They would hear them yes, but if the networkID does not match they will ignore it. That's why resetting the radios on the old hub is important. I can zniffer here and sometimes get random messages with a different ID, must be one of the neighbors, probably some sort of security system they have,

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This is exactly what i am going to do. The C8 will tasks over for most taks while the current C7 will be relagated to dealing with LAN based stuff and app. Though honestly the C-7 as it is now doesn't struggle with all of it most of the time as long as i don't do something stupid.

Ecobee Suites, Actiontiles, and InfluxDB logger are by far the most intensive jobs on my C7

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HomeKit will need to be enabled on every hub that has devices which you want to appear in HomeKit. Meshed hub devices are not exposed over HomeKit.

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For z-wave, the C-8 will assume the network Id of the C-7, and it will appear on the z-wave network as node 0. The old hub will need to be resetX and it will not participate in the z-wave network. Technically you could add if, which gives you the ability to send commands from it to other nodes, but it would never receive messages from the z-wave network, because it is not node 0. Also, just because the hub can technically send messages, it doesn’t mean it will. There is no way to create the z-wave devices with the target z-wave network IDs for the hub the send messages, nor would it be able to get update events for things like switch turned on.

Additionally, all devices that are on remote hubs will have the “on (hub name )” suffix added. And this suffix will appear on Connected services like sharptools, Alexa, google, etc.. HomeKit is the exception, because with HomeKit only local hub devices may be shared with HomeKit, so every hub will have homekit enabled.

You will only have one hub talking on the z-wave network, unless you really get into the nitty gritty of x-wave protocol and create custom code.

When you setup multiple hubs in a mesh, you are creating an Ethernet multicast group so that all hubs can subscribe to and send broadcast messages that only get picked up by the multicast subscribers.

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@AR3000 When you restore the zigbee radio on the C8 it assumes the IEEE address of the zigbee radio on the C7. Even resetting the zigbee radio on the C7 does not change the IEEE address, so bringing it online on the same zigbee channel as the C8 will cause issues. You can use it on a different channel without problems, or you can just turn it off.

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