Just went through this process and thought I'd thank everyone for the guidance provided and add my 2ยข.
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.