Hubitat Z-Wave Plus Certification ID

Mainly 1 lock .. But from what I have heard that same lock has had issues with many platforms.. And it also seems the issues are firmware...

And my house is mostly z-wave and I have no issues with any of my devices..

1 Like

I understand and agree completely with your concerns. Because with the above many people here routinely make the claim "X Y or Z" is the way zwave operates, using the knowledge they have from "certified zwave" and trying to apply the exact same diagnostics here, when in fact HE's zwave is NOT certified, nor do those offering the recommendations have knowledge if everything implemented on HE's zwave end is "up to" zwave certification specs.

There are numerous threads on the Smartthings forum of people having similar problems with z-wave locks.

2 Likes

Just a friendly discussion. No need to be like that.

I’m using SmartThings as an example because they are Z-Wave Plus certified, and you are mistaken in your assumption that a Z-Wave Plus certification for a controller guarantees that all Z-Wave devices will work with it.

4 Likes

Over the last year or so (in rush of iris and wink people) it has greatly been 1 lock the schlage but I've seen other issues with other locks pop up and the most common answer was "change to zigbee".... I have not seen this many lock problems with any other platform that was not resolved by either adding repeaters with beaming or repositioning the gateway or hub.

There are multiple threads on this and it's not even just a few from other vendors besides schlage.

You will never see that recommendation from me.. I prefer z-wave.. The standards are easier to program for (IMHO).. And I have one hell of a z-wave mesh.. But there is a lot of favoritism in this community for zigbee..

I do apologize for that.

However I did get defensive because I'm simply pointing out something I noticed today and everyone is jumping at it being very defensive of HE when there is no attack against HE but I'm trying to see why there are these odd issues with HE that I have not seen with other systems to this large degree.

Yes there are. However this actually would make sense as HE and ST have a shared driver structure and possibly some mistakes?

LOL - z-wave has standards... zigbee has whatever you want it to be and your own ZCL.

There is a lot of love for zigbee and I have a deep appreciation for it for some uses just not all.

My intents are not a z-wave vs zigbee but a why are these z-wave devices behaving so badly and not just locks in the bad behavior category... locks were just the easiest to pick on because they've been such a hot topic lately.

Not so much as you may think.. HE is way ahead of ST in z-wave class version support.. And having ported drivers that I wrote from HE to ST I can tell you that a lot is different here..

2 Likes

Now that's good and refreshing to hear.

2 Likes

That is basically what I said.. That’s why it’s so much easier for me to program z-wave drivers.. And why I said I prefer z-wave..

Zigbee still makes my head hurt..

1 Like

I know I was just repeating because I agreed. Next time I'll just like the post but then I'll run out of likes :slight_smile:

1 Like

Sorry.. I misunderstood..

But you will find .. I am very much a z-wave fan boy.. And coding z-wave drivers in HE is so much easier because of the advancements here vs ST

That's cool!

Can we start a club? :slight_smile: Oh wait.. there's one already Z-Wave Alliance :slight_smile:

1 Like

Accepted. Thanks for keeping it light :smiley:

Really no need. I hope you didn't read a tone into my reply. There honestly wasn't one intended. Was trying my best to be respectful. I too, do apologize if it didn't come off that way. I'm an HE supporter as I know you are too. Honestly, in my books the hub has paid for itself in time saved over having to learn and maintain a Home Assistant platform. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

I'm slowly furthering my education around Z-Wave, and I do know that there are things in the certification requirement like "Replace" that are missing from the HE platform and would have to be added for certification. But for the most part, there isn't anything that is in that certification process that would make the Z-Wave Plus radio they are using any more capable to join devices. Rather, there would be tools available to deal with the issues that arise with Z-Wave devices.

I'll give another example using the Ring Keypad (apologies for not being more creative with my examples :wink:). I just today removed my Ring Keypad to try again with the latest HE platform build and see if I could get it to join to the hub. It wouldn't. When I went to join it back to the Ring hub, it wouldn't join there either. Spent an hour resetting the keypad, excluding, resetting and rebooting the Ring hub, removed its backup battery to get the Z-Wave radio to fully power off, etc. Finally, I reset the thing again, and tried to join it as a generic Z-Wave device under the lock section of all places. It joined with a "major failure" as they worded it in their app. Then it took me time to figure out how to kill that device from their database. After that, for no reason that makes any sense to me, it finally joined with S2 using a classic inclusion method, since the SmartStart method still wouldn't work for some strange reason.

So I'm just using that example because, here's a Z-Wave Plus certified controller that sometimes has problems joining their own Z-Wave Plus certified devices! :rofl:

5 Likes

I actually did a really fun driver recently for a cool device.. utilized z-wave multichannel associations back to the hub and multichannel encap to get the most capabilities out of this touch panel controller.. And the hub was acting like the end device so all my z-wave command classes were from what is normally on the device side instead of the hub side.. It was a fun exercise

1 Like

I love the little hub and the Zigbee support that it has. Home Assistant isn't that hard! :slight_smile:

That's the thing with "gateways" is they have a device categorization themselves with their own certification which is based around the software implementation not the Radio. The Radio/Chips only comes from 2 possible vendors today. So there's nothing there to certify. It's all about the software implementation and really mostly about the base features because each system can "expand" and add their own extras which we see all the time from Fibaro and other vendors especially like the new dimmers with their scene controllers and LED light controls etc. Those features are "extra" and not covered under certification but the basic on/off/dim/brighten those better work! Which is why I picked on a lock the basics lock/unlock/status should work. Period and if not then there's a problem. The whole user codes and stuff I think codes were added to ZWP.. I'd have to check but otherwise some of the other things are extras...

Ring is a "special" kind of "special" and Amazon does things their "special" way :slight_smile:
I'm really not surprised that it's having issues even with itself. The S2 stuff last I heard still was not "final" and completely worked out which is giving vendors a lot of grief about implementing it. Some device vendors implemented it fast and marketed it but it's only half-implemented so...??? what good is that? I still remember the colorful discussion with HomeSeer developers all around S2... :slight_smile:

Back to Ring... still not too surprised as left hand and right hand probably never discussed things like inclusion and certainly not proper exclusion... who would exclude the device after it's installed??? I mean really! :slight_smile:

Here's a similar one... how about a HomeSeer controller that doesn't work correctly with a HomeSeer Dimmer???? I've had that happen to me. It's a funny thing the "brand" doesn't indicate who actually MADE the device nor what firmware (software) the device has and whether or not the controller software can speak to the device firmware correctly to use extra features.

1 Like

A standard that doesn’t evolve is a dying standard.. Z-wave handled this well with the class versioning.. So when new / better ways come around it can be implemented without breaking the older stuff..

Zigbee seemed to take a different approach by trying to be everything and think of everything that could be.. Which makes it hard to read the standard.. And feels bloated to me..

You could basically totally write a driver based on the z-wave alliance listing.. Obviously need the device for testing.. But the listings are that detailed (for most devices)

2 Likes