I'm going to be migrating from my C5 to a C7 soon. I was planning on leaving some of the devices on the C5. Namely, the three Zooz 4-in-1s I have and a couple of Zigbee devices. But I had something fall on the hub and the USB cable was destructively ripped out. I was able to wiggle and push things around just right to get it powered back on, but I don't want to even touch it because it'll probably lose power forever. So I'm going to start migrating everything this upcoming weekend and over next week.
Anyway, I want to be able to include devices with no security, which I understand is not possible with some devices and they'll default to S0, which I want to avoid. So I want to order a zwave usb stick. I was thinking one of these might cost like $20 - $25, but I can't seem to find anything less than about $40, which seems a little high to me. Of course, I also don't know where to look besides Amazon.
Not sure about your S0 question but I use Silicon Labs. $20. Mouser and digikey both have them. Not sure on lead time. Others like the Aeotec stick because it has an include button on it and you can use it as a portable inclusion device.
Aeotec has made early-access versions of the successor to Z-Stick 7, Z-Stick 7, available for the purposes of testing and development. As 700 series Z-Wave is not yet compatible with all automation software
I think that is referring to home automation systems like HomeAssistant / Homeseer etc and not the reference software provided by Silicon Labs. Should be the same as the UZB-7 & Zooz Sticks.
UZB-7 is the swiss army knife. Can never go wrong with that one.
The Z-Stick 7 have region specific antenna, so may have better range than a UZB-7 (although I can't confirm that). But there is less guarantee of compatibiity with the SiLabs tools as it isn't exactly a reference design (although is probably close enough for most uses).
I just wish one of the manufacturers would make a 700 series USB stick with external SMA antennna. Maybe someday - no technical reason it can't be done.
My point is that I wish there were one that came with an SMA connector already on it. You can find usb zigbee adapters all day long that come with external SMA antenna, but there aren't any zwave 700 ones like that (yet).
Maybe! I looked at the fcc internal pics of the UZB-7, a mod might be able to be done. They use a pcb antenna - unlike the uzb-5 that used a coil antenna.
I'm not that interested in modding a uzb-7 as the antenna seems to work quite well as-is. But if someone sold a generic zwave 700 usb stick with sma antenna, I would buy it. That's all I'm saying.
The other thing is that there will likely be a different uzb equivalent/type device once zwave-lr comes out, as the uzb7 can't even transmit (even close to) the max power of the zwave lr spec...
zwave 700 was originally 13 dBm output max, but zwave lr raised that to 30 dBm max... So it would just be logical that someone will make a new usb stick with the new rev of the zwave chip + higher power radio/transmitters at some point. Just got to wait for new phy's that support the higher output to come out.
I think the c7 can support the LoRa higher power spec with existing hardware. Looking at the board I think it should be capable of doing so. I think it just needs to be unlocked software wise. Maybe @bcopeland will chime in and confirm.
I haven't looked at it in detail. But silabs did make new phy to support the higher output. So I would have guessed that Hubitat was capped at the 13 dbm. I could definitely be wrong though.
That's not necessarily a bad thing for the average use case. Going above 13 dbm is only really required for extremely long range applications (1 mile+, or shorter with a lot of interference I suppose).
For example my lora devices can go that high on power, but none of them actually do or need to.. even the ones that are a few blocks away. I only bring up lora in this conversation because the protocol and modulation are similar.
EDIT: I forgot.. There were already press releases on the new hardware that allows for the full power zwave lr... Zwave 800... Should have remembered that the other day. The new hardware still isn't needed/necessary for normal uses though - so no one needs to panic/feel obsoleted now that there is slightly newer hardware.
