C8? Has anyone heard any talk of the next generation?

I dare to ask...but I do know the C7 was a C5 with the new zwave 700 chip.

It's been (almost) 2 years since the C7.

Speculations?

I'm guessing 800-series ZW is one wait, and also likely waiting to see how Matter/Thread stuff actually goes in the next 6-12 months (will it really move forward in all the promised ways by all the promised partners or will it devolve & suffer fragmentation).

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The last one was "Gen Z" so my guess would be "Gen 1" or "Gen A" :slight_smile:

AFAIK it's in development as we speak...believe I saw that noted in another thread here somewhere.

Of course, you wonder how quickly you would want a C8 device, given the "fun" we've all had w/C7 over the past couple of years as that platform has had a bumpy process maturing, and is only now getting a significant Z-Wave stack update that seems to alleviate several key problems.

I for one will not be joining any C8 bandwagon until some riskier early adopters venture into the valley of death and come out smelling like roses. :wink:

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I'll bet the ongoing chip shortage will make it a little while before we see the next Hubitat hub. The three speculations I have are that:

  1. It may have at least an external z-wave antenna because @Hubitat_Staff mentioned that was under consideration at some point of time.
  2. They added WiFi support to the C7 via an external dongle, so adding onboard WiFi support seems like it would be a consideration.
  3. Lots of automations are date/time dependent, and there are many posts on the community about time-of-day dependent automations not firing as expected, so I think a RTC with a battery backup is likely.
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But isn't that half the fun?1

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For me, great fun!

For wife...no no no no no no no no no no no

And that's on a good day. :wink:

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Where is this "significant Z-Wave stack update"?

In beta test. So not yet released.

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As @aaiyar noted, in beta.

And (hopefully this doesn't break my Beta NDA!) you're gonna love it. :slight_smile:

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It is mentioned in this public thread, if you are not in the beta: Zwave get updated 7.17.1 - #125 by jbilodea
The links at the top of the thread has the Silabs release notes.

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I just reviewed the link mentioned. While there seem to be some improvements with the update, there are still reports of problems and odd behavior.

Correct.

Although in the zwavejs2mqtt community, the number of issues and their severity are both substantially decreased,

The anecdotal reports we’ve seen here (from @jbilodea and others) suggest impressive improvements.

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For my own case, my network is stable like never before. I'm really happy. Hope it helps everybody.

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As @aaiyar suggests, that update fixes only the bug(s) mentioned, leaving all the rest of the bugs unaddressed. Ultimately it's about if you're being hit by the bug, then the update will improve your life. If Not, maybe your bug will be in the next SiLabs release. :slight_smile: It's quite clear that 7.17.1 is a significant fix for the bug(s) identified. It seems to introduce no additional bugs, which is perhaps a bigger "feature." :slight_smile:

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Agree...so far, at least from what we've seen posted, it's a very good update, and hasn't been found to torpedo anything (yet). :slight_smile:

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Just curious if the limit of 32 Zigbee devices directly connected to the hub is a limit that could be overcome with a new hub? I tend to favor Zigbee over Zwave and thus have more Zigbee devices.

I think with zigbee 3.0 the limit is 64 devices directly connected to the hub/coordinator.

The appropriate solution here is to add lots of zigbee routers. I have a large mesh with a Zigbee 3.0 coordinator that is very stable and fast. I have a total of about 80 devices on this network, of which 14 are zigbee routers. Only four end-devices are connected directly to the coordinator. The rest are all connected via routers.

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Interestingly enough, SmartThings raised the limit on my v2 hub from 32 to 64 with a firmware update (just as I was removing devices and moving them to my C-7). So you might not even need a new hub.

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OMG I want that Zigbee network map! How did you generate it?