RaZberry future development

[PoltoS]

@vinisz yes, just do a backup & restore

[vinisz]

Does not seem to work, no devices are restored.
(I created backup from UZB and restoring to Razberry pro 7)

@poltos, really need your help here... I cannot migrate.

[vinisz]

Never mind, I found the issue here on the forum, just needed to add the 7.16 to 7.16 mapping...

[rockdee733]

can I order one with external antenna at a reseller in NL ? (or can you ship me one ? watch movies

9apps download

[PoltoS]

can I order one with external antenna at a reseller in NL ? (or can you ship me one ?

https://www.robbshop.nl/search?search=razberry

[milindneta5]

When is the new integration for Homeassistant coming? mobdro

[PoltoS]

Within the next week

[mango]

I have five physical Pro boards. it is one system as Z-Way allows you to integrate multiple systems into one.

So my setup:
Raspberry Pi 4B with Razberry Pro board spread throughout the house and they are running Z-way. I then have a VM built that is also running Z-Way that is linked to the five boards. Look for the app called "Link other Z-Way controller". While I have a VM running Z-Way to aggregate the systems, you can use one of the systems with the Razberry board. I just decided to have the Pi's do Z-Wave and have a central Z-Way that just aggregates and is where I do the rules, apps, etc.

On the individual Pi's you see all of the devices that are part of its Z-Wave network. So if on one Pi you have 30 devices, it only knows of those 30 devices. The other Pi's are the same way, they just know of their own devices that have been included. Then the central VM I have knows of everything. Like I mentioned above, you can use a system with a Razberry board. So if you have two Pi's then one only knows of its own devices and the second knows of those of and the devices on its board as well.

Hey Ian, Im not sure how big your place is to warrant so many, but I have a double story and I’m sure my current Razberry can use some improvement in signal from a 7 pro. My question is does the z-way linking synchronise zwave frequencies or will it potentially interfere with each other? Overall how have you found your setup to work? (At the moment I’m just looking to replace my old razberry with a 7 pro.

[lanbrown]

It is 3200 square feet of living space on a single story. That doesn't include the two garages, the front courtyard (sort of between the two garages) not the back porch. All interior walls also have insulation in them; which does reduce signal strength.

The goal was to limit the need for a mesh. In the past with a single controller some OTA updates would take over an hour. You need to realize that the "physical" layer of Z-Wave (yes wireless is considered a physical layer) is very simplistic in that the packet sizes are small and it sends a packet and then waits for an ACK. The wireless speed is also very low which means serialization delay is high. So by removing the mesh as much as possible I'm reducing how long OTA updates take. I also ran into a huge issue in February of 2021 during the great deep freeze of Texas. The GE (Jasco) switches were known to die as many had issues after the 1 year warranty was up. I had several die a few weeks before the warranty but didn't get them replaced as I had no faith in GE (Jasco) products. True story, I turned the power off to replace a dead one, flipped the breaker back on and another one on that same circuit; this happened a few times. I had like 40 or 50 of these things and now I only have two active ones and they are in a box all by themself. So if they die, they are easy enough to replace. So when they started to die, the Z-Wave network was very unstable, some devices not reachable and overall, pretty much nothing would work. Every time they turned the power off, when it was restored, more dead GE (Jasco) switches. So this is when I started looking at alternatives. Z-Wave also supports a maximum of 232 devices. I have 220-some devices. So I was already at the edge of capacity and as devices get more chatty (power metering, temp, humidity, states, etc.) then the more network traffic you have and thus the slower things get.

Enough of the above and now to answer some of your questions. Each Razberry 7 controls its own network. So yes, there would be some interference from some devices. Keep in mind that you already get interference from Z-Wave devices when they need to talk to the controller and another Z-Wave also wants to talk. If you have a mesh and the device that needs to be communicated with is not directly accessible from the controller, when the repeater function works, it also creates interference. It has to receive the packet, store it and then transmits it.

I'm going to use my setup for this example, you can do the linking with only two systems. I have five Raspberry 4B's each with Razberry 7 Pro board. Then on a sixth system is what combines those five into a single GUI. All Expert related functions as well as adding and removing Z-Wave devices are done on the systems with the Razberry 7 boards. It has the full Z-Way system on it and you can create rules, schedules, scenes, etc. All the sixth system does is give you the GUI where all of the devices/entities from the five systems are listed and it is the only system that knows of all of the devices. So system 1 with a Razberry 7 board only knows of its devices, not what is on system 2. So I consider that sixth system as the core as it communicates with the other five systems. I can create rules, schedules on scenes on it just like the devices were on a Razberry board physically on the system. You can't use the expert GUI though as the Razberry board is not on this system that has the devices. So it doesn't synchronize the Z-Wave frequencies.

One thing you could do is use Expert interface and look at the Network tab and then Neighbors and see what devices directly talk to the controller and what devices don't You can also use under the Expert interface the Analytics tab and then Route Map to see it as well. If you place one controller far enough away, the only interference would be devices at the farthest edges of the two networks that overlap. As previously mentioned, in a mesh that causes interference. Only a single device can communicate on a given channel at a time anyway. So receiving the packet and then transmitting it eats up the time of two packets.

The only issue I ran into the linking of Z-Way controllers is that the default of 1 second caused Z-Way to be unstable of the core Z-Way instance that aggregated everything. It would eventually start to have issues and some device states were not updating, then more more updating and eventually Z-Way was not accessible, but restarting Z-Way on the core resolved the issue. I eventually changed it from 1 second to 5 seconds and haven't had an issue since. PoltoS wanted remote access when the system had an issue but then couldn't get in because Z-Way had crashed. So it was a catch-22 scenario.

On the core system is what Home Assistant knows of and communicates with. If Home Assistant wants to turn a light on, it communicates with the core Z-Way instance and then it tells the remote Z-Way system with the Razberry board to turn a light on. To tell you have fast it can actually do this. At night when the TV is turned on in the master bedroom, it turns the lights out in the master bathroom. Home Assistant is communicating with a Logitech Harmony Pro 2400. So when Home Assistant see it go from off to an activity it turns the lights off in the bathroom. As soon as I hit the power button the Harmony remote, the TV comes on and the lights go off in the bathroom. There is no perceivable delay at all. Which makes since, the Harmony Pro 2400 is connected via 100Mb copper which also provides the power via PoE, and the Raspberry is 1Gbps on the core and the remote instance and so is Home Assistant. In the previous system there was a perceivable delay albeit very slight. That delay was the low wireless speed of Z-Wave channels, the multiple hops it took.

So I would say my system works very well. Hopefully there will be some changes to Z-Way in regards to WebSockets (it is currently supported and used by the Home Assistant integration) in that it will be used for the Z-Way linking. This way there is a communication channel already built between the systems and as device states change it would be in realtime without the use of polling.

In your case, you can just tell one system about the other. So let's say you tell system A about System B. System B still only knows about the devices configured on it and in the Razberry board. System A will know devices it is configured for as well as from System B. I went with a separate system so each remote system is limited to what it does. Most don't have any apps installed on them nor any local rules. So they are really just handling Z-Way to Z-Wave communication. This way things are stable since there are no scripts or apps that might cause issues; it is a vanilla installation.

A few things I plan on doing. The use of a Turing Pi 2 board. This will house the Z-Way core as well as Home Assistant. Each will be on a different module as the Turing Pi 2 can handle up to four. They are going to offer a module based upon the RK3588 which will have far more power than a Raspberry 4 and they will offer up to 32GB of RAM as well. Z-Way is 32-bit so it will stay on the current Raspberry Pi 4 compute module with 8GB of RAM. Home Assistant will move to a RK3588 module with either 16GB or 32GB of RAM. I plan on also having a "Dev" Z-way core that can communicate with the existing five Z-Way installs (not the core though) and then a "Dev" Home Assistant system that runs the beta releases of Home Assistant. This way I can test the beta releases with my current setup but any changes would be isolated to the the "Dev" Home Assistant and Z-Way systems. This is also where new releases of Z-Way are tested before they get implemented into the production systems.

Hopefully this answers your questions.

[mango]

It is 3200 square feet of living space on a single story. That doesn't include the two garages, the front courtyard (sort of between the two garages) not the back porch. All interior walls also have insulation in them; which does reduce signal strength.

The goal was to limit the need for a mesh. In the past with a single controller some OTA updates would take over an hour. You need to realize that the "physical" layer of Z-Wave (yes wireless is considered a physical layer) is very simplistic in that the packet sizes are small and it sends a packet and then waits for an ACK. The wireless speed is also very low which means serialization delay is high. So by removing the mesh as much as possible I'm reducing how long OTA updates take. I also ran into a huge issue in February of 2021 during the great deep freeze of Texas. The GE (Jasco) switches were known to die as many had issues after the 1 year warranty was up. I had several die a few weeks before the warranty but didn't get them replaced as I had no faith in GE (Jasco) products. True story, I turned the power off to replace a dead one, flipped the breaker back on and another one on that same circuit; this happened a few times. I had like 40 or 50 of these things and now I only have two active ones and they are in a box all by themself. So if they die, they are easy enough to replace. So when they started to die, the Z-Wave network was very unstable, some devices not reachable and overall, pretty much nothing would work. Every time they turned the power off, when it was restored, more dead GE (Jasco) switches. So this is when I started looking at alternatives. Z-Wave also supports a maximum of 232 devices. I have 220-some devices. So I was already at the edge of capacity and as devices get more chatty (power metering, temp, humidity, states, etc.) then the more network traffic you have and thus the slower things get.

Enough of the above and now to answer some of your questions. Each Razberry 7 controls its own network. So yes, there would be some interference from some devices. Keep in mind that you already get interference from Z-Wave devices when they need to talk to the controller and another Z-Wave also wants to talk. If you have a mesh and the device that needs to be communicated with is not directly accessible from the controller, when the repeater function works, it also creates interference. It has to receive the packet, store it and then transmits it.

I'm going to use my setup for this example, you can do the linking with only two systems. I have five Raspberry 4B's each with Razberry 7 Pro board. Then on a sixth system is what combines those five into a single GUI. All Expert related functions as well as adding and removing Z-Wave devices are done on the systems with the Razberry 7 boards. It has the full Z-Way system on it and you can create rules, schedules, scenes, etc. All the sixth system does is give you the GUI where all of the devices/entities from the five systems are listed and it is the only system that knows of all of the devices. So system 1 with a Razberry 7 board only knows of its devices, not what is on system 2. So I consider that sixth system as the core as it communicates with the other five systems. I can create rules, schedules on scenes on it just like the devices were on a Razberry board physically on the system. You can't use the expert GUI though as the Razberry board is not on this system that has the devices. So it doesn't synchronize the Z-Wave frequencies.

One thing you could do is use Expert interface and look at the Network tab and then Neighbors and see what devices directly talk to the controller and what devices don't You can also use under the Expert interface the Analytics tab and then Route Map to see it as well. If you place one controller far enough away, the only interference would be devices at the farthest edges of the two networks that overlap. As previously mentioned, in a mesh that causes interference. Only a single device can communicate on a given channel at a time anyway. So receiving the packet and then transmitting it eats up the time of two packets.

The only issue I ran into the linking of Z-Way controllers is that the default of 1 second caused Z-Way to be unstable of the core Z-Way instance that aggregated everything. It would eventually start to have issues and some device states were not updating, then more more updating and eventually Z-Way was not accessible, but restarting Z-Way on the core resolved the issue. I eventually changed it from 1 second to 5 seconds and haven't had an issue since. PoltoS wanted remote access when the system had an issue but then couldn't get in because Z-Way had crashed. So it was a catch-22 scenario.

On the core system is what Home Assistant knows of and communicates with. If Home Assistant wants to turn a light on, it communicates with the core Z-Way instance and then it tells the remote Z-Way system with the Razberry board to turn a light on. To tell you have fast it can actually do this. At night when the TV is turned on in the master bedroom, it turns the lights out in the master bathroom. Home Assistant is communicating with a Logitech Harmony Pro 2400. So when Home Assistant see it go from off to an activity it turns the lights off in the bathroom. As soon as I hit the power button the Harmony remote, the TV comes on and the lights go off in the bathroom. There is no perceivable delay at all. Which makes since, the Harmony Pro 2400 is connected via 100Mb copper which also provides the power via PoE, and the Raspberry is 1Gbps on the core and the remote instance and so is Home Assistant. In the previous system there was a perceivable delay albeit very slight. That delay was the low wireless speed of Z-Wave channels, the multiple hops it took.

So I would say my system works very well. Hopefully there will be some changes to Z-Way in regards to WebSockets (it is currently supported and used by the Home Assistant integration) in that it will be used for the Z-Way linking. This way there is a communication channel already built between the systems and as device states change it would be in realtime without the use of polling.

In your case, you can just tell one system about the other. So let's say you tell system A about System B. System B still only knows about the devices configured on it and in the Razberry board. System A will know devices it is configured for as well as from System B. I went with a separate system so each remote system is limited to what it does. Most don't have any apps installed on them nor any local rules. So they are really just handling Z-Way to Z-Wave communication. This way things are stable since there are no scripts or apps that might cause issues; it is a vanilla installation.

A few things I plan on doing. The use of a Turing Pi 2 board. This will house the Z-Way core as well as Home Assistant. Each will be on a different module as the Turing Pi 2 can handle up to four. They are going to offer a module based upon the RK3588 which will have far more power than a Raspberry 4 and they will offer up to 32GB of RAM as well. Z-Way is 32-bit so it will stay on the current Raspberry Pi 4 compute module with 8GB of RAM. Home Assistant will move to a RK3588 module with either 16GB or 32GB of RAM. I plan on also having a "Dev" Z-way core that can communicate with the existing five Z-Way installs (not the core though) and then a "Dev" Home Assistant system that runs the beta releases of Home Assistant. This way I can test the beta releases with my current setup but any changes would be isolated to the the "Dev" Home Assistant and Z-Way systems. This is also where new releases of Z-Way are tested before they get implemented into the production systems.

Hopefully this answers your questions.

Thanks alot of this Ian! Its very comprehensive and obviously wasnt just a 2 second reply. I think im largely following in your footsteps as i am using HA as my main touch point for Smart Home Automation, and leveraging Z-Way for the advanced Z-Wave diagnostics/capabilities. The Turing Pi seems to be some really bleeding edge stuff. I'm certainly glad people like you are keeping the scene alive. Once again much appreciate your insights on this!