Just catching what you wrote and it underlines something that to me is a critical component that might be added to HE. Others might well consider "creep-of-scope".
While everybody says, "go get the 3rd Party tools for this" I say...
ARE WE DOING EVERYTHING WE COULD DO in the HE box to facilitate Network/Mesh inspection ...and if this is one of the PRIMARY THINGS causing implementations to "hit the wall" (pun intended) then I'm willing to pay a little more for the next generation HE box to have the tools onboard to help analyze the potential pitfalls in the mesh I'm laying out.
I mean seriously, knowing what we all know (AND FEAR) with these networks wouldn't you buy the box that can help with network & device connectivity health/resiliency analysis over the box that couldn't. Understanding that the challenge here might be about radios and their duplicity in one box, at the least make this an option that someone could buy and plug in before they totally gave up on implementing HA.
Well trying to write something that would do mesh analysis at the radio wave level would be quite an undertaking and would likely require more than one z-wave/zigbee radio as I don't think sniffing/analyzing would do well on a single one. (Someone more knowlegable can correct me if I'm wrong). The box is built for common denominators. It can't account for everything. I will say there has been talk about doing a version with an external antenna setup which would help alleviate a lot of signal issues but even that can't account for everything. A good example is 1920-1935 or so houses that not only used plaster and lathe, but used mesh nailed to the top of the lathe. I've been in and worked on these houses and even cell phone reception gets trashed. I guess what I'm saying is that only so much can be done. I'm hoping z-wave LR changes a little bit of this.
I hear ya, but even the surroundings aren't the whole story. I mean how many times have we seen device discussions mentioning, "maybe it is one of those that had the bad/weak radios", "those don't repeat well", "first pair it NEXT to the HE", "I'm line of sight and it still routes through XYZ", "try a different channel maybe there's congestion" etc.
I know I'm doing some arm waving here that is more technically challenging than waving my arm...but addressing this to the best degree you can in the HE box would be a gift for a lot of folks bird-dogging implementations. Granted there are probably other things like ZigBee and Z-Wave improvements in protocols/standards that might be even more incrementally beneficial.
Anyway...enough musings. Just saying...the nuances of the network/mesh is proverbial "Black Magic" to a lot of folks in the next tranche of HA adoption. They just won't tolerate it...,they'll take the off ramp a lot sooner than the OP.
I was feeling quite depressed over it all and could not bring myself to replying and continuing down HE for a while. Since then though I have upgraded my home to a C7 and things have become much more reliable yet nowhere near 100%
Since I cloned my c5 to the c7 I have lost the connection to the cloud and app so I am now looking to set it all up from scratch again.
Thanks for the help, I will try to keep things as simple as possible in the hub but I am also looking at what community validated hardware works reliably for the aus market and I will ask that in a new topic.
I have read a while back that its due to moving from the external zwave antenna to the internal c7 one. Its not even the cloud thats the issue but rather that I cannot upgrade the firmware anymore!
What do you mean by this? I've updated firmware with both internal and external antennas and not had a problem. If you're not connecting to the cloud that's wholly a network issue.
But I guess I'm not sure what you mean by "upgrade the firmware"?
If you mean devices firmware - that still works (but is kinda slow and clunky imho) and now with the C7 you can update some Zigbee devices as well.
If you mean internal radio firmware - C7's are the only hubs that can do this "officially" afaik.. I guess you could do this with the stick but that was outside the normal operation and not sanctioned. I do think the external stick was a more flexible solution though but no doubt had it's own set of headaches for the folks at HE.
Anyway if you still have your stick and a spare computer/vm you can play around with HomeAssistant and bridging HE and HA together. Lots of tinkering goodness and expanded capabilities to be had if you are into that sort of thing like I am.
I am guessing this refers to the external USB sticks needed for z-wave connectivity on C5 hubs sold outside the US. It's not just an antenna, but the whole z-wave chipset that's on the USB dongle. @rlithgow1 you are probably referring to the "antenna mod" that some many, many many users have tried out.
Well based on the number of repairs I've done for people that tried and failed. I'd say I've probably done the majority of them but there are some skilled solderer's out there. I honestly didn't even know there were that many people on the forums here to ask me for it. When I originally offered my help, I was expecting maybe 10 or 20.
I backed up my old c5 hub and imported it to a new c7. Its been a while now but either having the c5 hub and c7 hub in operation and the diference of external/internal antennas I remember reading somewhere that it may somehow afffect the hub connecting to the cloud (app, firmware, find my hub etc) which happenned. Again its been a while now but I read that the easyest fix is to reset and build the C7 hub up from scratch.
The firmware thing is strange, I just tell it to update and it just sits there checking endlesly. I also didnt get any popups/notifications for new firmware in the top right. I only went to update it to get the new broadlink drivers.
The find my hub feature on the hubitat portal doesnt list either of the hubs but I can still access them via the IP address.
Since my C7 is not functioning properly and I am also looking to shift to Kasa switches and some other wall powered sensors and button controlers (motion + temp, please recommend any) I will reset the C7 and start my automations again with just the c7. Currently the C5 is only running for some zigbee devices that I havent managed to reset/re pair to the C7 yet.
I didn't even know this was a thing. I guess I've been away for a while-things were running smoothly. Is there enough feedback that it's been successful?
.
