It's not possible to downgrade the stick after the upgrade, but I think your question is on whether it wipes the stick's config or not. I was able to upgrade the firmware while keeping the current ZWave network in-tact.
Would it be possible to do a test where the NVM data pulled from one of these upgraded Nortek devices is sent to someone at Hubitat manually and then inserted into the database for a test user as if it had been uploaded from the device, and then migrated to a new hub to see if it takes it as expected?
I don't know if that's something we will entertain or not homestly, I'll run it up the flagpole and see what happens.
Thanks @mike.maxwell - If its any incentive.. its basically the only thing making me not upgrade to the C7. My home has many devices that are built in and / or extremely difficult to get to so re pairing all of those devices is practically speaking impossible - I've only done it once, when I moved over from Smartthings and the entire process took months and in some cases involved calling out an electrician. Although there may not be as many people with such difficulties as me, I reckon you may find that a lot of people would buy a new hub from Hubitat if they knew this was possible!
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Thanks so much for this guide! Amazing work!
I used the newest SDK version available (v6.84.0) which put version 6.10 on my stick when I was done.
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Thanks so much for the guide.
TP28 can be used for the reset. TP28 is on the opposite side of the board and is near pin 1 of the usb connector and also near C7. This is a much larger pad and easy to solder to. I successfully programmed used TP28. If you solder a wire, keep it short it might be sensitive to noise pickup.
I also used the 6.84 SDK which can be found here, look under z-wave-500-series.
https://www.silabs.com/developers/z-wave-500-series
For the PC controller software, that does not seem to be available as a direct link. One has to download simplicity studio 5, from within the application it gives you the option to download other software including the controller.
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Just did another stick using TP28 - much easier and very helpful info, thank you!!
I have already upgraded the HusbZb following this tutorial (V 6.09). If I want to update it to the new version 6.10, I have to disassemble the USB dongle again or can I do it directly from the Z-Wave PC Controller program? Thanks
Yes, I looked into the built-in upgrade mechanism, and if I'm remembering right there wasn't enough NVRAM in the stick to enable it.
@mike.maxwell - wanted to see if you guys would be up for doing the test where the nvm data is inserted manually into the database as if it had been uploaded from the device? Its a way for me esp to be able to move to a new hub if it worked - and it would only be a one off event for anyone wanting to do it so the burden in terms of requests is likely to be low
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I have seemingly successfully crossed flashed the zware part of a Husbzb to use Australia / New Zealand frequencies.
Oddly it didn't work initially with ZwaveJS (fw 6.81). I couldn't get inclusion to work, the new node would be found but it would error out before adding it. However after i uppdated the firmware to 6.84 and did an inclusion with the PC Controller it seems to work. Both exclusion/inclusion work fine.
Thanks, Where can I find where TP28 is? any schematics ?
There seems to be different PCB revisions. Mine does not look like the picture earlier in this post. For me TP28 is on the top near the USB connector
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Thanks for this additional information.
By following your advice I was able to use it to download sdk 6.84 and flash zwave firmware v.6.10 onto the zwave side of my HUSBZB-1 despite my unsteady hands, which have prevented me before because pin #15 is way to small.
Best regards.
Cesar
Just completed this update on my stick. I ran into an issue that I thought I would note here in case it helps anyone in the future.
I was already using a 3-foot USB extension cord with my setup, and during the flashing process I still had it plugged in to the extension. No matter which USB port I tried, I could not get the Z-Wave Programmer utility to read any data from my stick. I needed to plug the stick directly into my front-panel USB port in order to connect, it worked flawlessly after that.
This was confounding to me, as I've had no issues running the stick using this extension cord. My guess is that the cord must have been inducing noise into the line during programming or something.
Just went through this process and thought I'd thank everyone for the guidance provided and add my 2¢.
First off, I have pretty established Zwave and Zigbee networks running off of my HUSBZB-1, so I was hesitant to screw that up by upgrading in place. So, I purchased a second HUSBZB-1 on which to do the upgrades and then restored backups of my original stick to the new one. Worked like a charm. That's not to say there weren't hiccups, though, so I'll get into that.
As I said, I run both Zigbee and Zwave networks off of my stick, so I started with the Zigbee firmware upgrade process found here: "github walthowd husbzb-firmware". This was easy and straight-forward and worked fine. I'm using podman on Fedora instead of docker, so there was a little tweaking I had to do to get that to work. First, an selinux boolean needed to be set to allow containers to access devices ($ sudo setsebool container_use_devices on), and I had to make sure my user's dialout group membership got reflected inside of the container by adding --group-add keep-groups to the podman run command.
The Zwave part was the most challenging, but still not so bad.
My first issue was trying to get the CP210x drivers working in Windows 11. I would install the drivers, but in Device Manager I'd still see "HubZ Zigbee Com Port" and "HubZ Z-Wave Com Port" under "Other Devices" with no drivers associated with them. I had to follow the instructions here ("Nortec HUSBZB USB Stick Windows Drivers") to force Windows to use the driver for those devices. Once that was done, things worked much better.
The other issue I had was the same that @baccula had: the stick would work while plugged into a USB extension cord for all purposes but using the Z-wave Programmer. I had to plug the stick directly into a USB port for Z-wave Programmer to be happy reading or writing anything. Luckily I have a USB hub on a cable that let me have some flexibility in how I held the stick while poking TP28 with a wire.
After all of the firmware upgrades were done, I shut down my hub, pulled the original HUSBZB-1, and then used the methods described here and in the Zigbee upgrade instructions to back up the networks/eeprom to disk, and then restored to the new, upgraded stick. The Zwave eeprom restore failed on the first attempt, but I just tried again and it worked.
Both networks are now up and running just fine on the new stick. Maybe I'll use the old stick as a Zniffer now.
Edit: Ok, looks like I'm not allowed to include hyperlinks in my comment here. That's annoying. So, if you want to find information about upgrading the Zigbee firmware just Google "github walthowd husbzb-firmware", and if you want information about getting the Windows drivers working look for the post titled "Nortec HUSBZB USB Stick Windows Drivers" on this forum.
Sorry to comment on this old of a thread, but I thought this might be helpful. I tried the process above, but I used the latest SDK -- 6.84.0. Unfortunately, my controller stick wasn't able to communicate with any of my Zwave environment. I also wasn't able to add new nodes -- no matter what the security setting was. I had tried half a dozen things and was about to give up, but instead tracked down the SDK_v6_82_01 version of the .hex file and flashed it on a whim. Surprisingly, this version of the hex worked perfectly. I'm completely back up and did not have to re-add anything after the firmware upgrade. Thank you for the instructions above!!
I made an account to say THANK YOU for the write up on this, and to offer a small piece of advice for future readers.
If you've already been using your stick with S2 keys set in software (as I was with Home Assistant and Z-Wave JS initially, then later Z-Wave JS UI) then you'll want to NOT check the boxes for "Add S2 keypair" or "Generate S2 keypair". Doing so seems to break the ability to set those key values in software. When I tried it, my stick came up, but no S2 devices would connect. Thankfully it's an easy fix - just reupload the firmware with those boxes unchecked and you'll be set.
This procedure let me migrate from an HUSBZB-1 to a Zooz ZST10 super easily and with no impact to my Z-Wave network. I used the Z-Wave JS UI (formerly known as zwavejs2mqtt) Backup/Restore NVM functionality and everything reconnected immediately.
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