- Posted on
Mon Feb 17, 2014 11:17 am
-
theloon
offline
-
- Posts: 2
- Joined: Feb 17, 2014
It seems like the Z-Stick 2 development is dead, there has been no new firmware since 3.07 which is dated July 2010. The routing also seems to have fundamental and repeatable bugs, one of the main ones being what other folks have seen here, the inability to recover from a missing device and build a new routing table around it.
The device does not need to actually die, just being unreachable for an extended period of time borks the routing on the z-stick.
The indigo 6 software on the another hand is pretty darn rock solid, and is therefore let down by using a z-stick.
It's hard to find a controller at a reasonable price and impossible to find one with the functionality offered by Indigo. Z-stick plus Indigo was an obvious solution, spend the big money on the smart stuff i.e. Indigo software, and then get a pretty dumb controller as they are cheap to build and require a minimal software load.
Something I have been playing with, as I no-longer have the time or patience to mess with z-stick again, is using a Pi with the Z-Wave card in. It can be driven using json and seems to be rock solid when it comes to device connectivity, but the routing table is accessible/viewable so you can see what is going on. The client software on z-wave is years from Indigo, but that is not relevant.
Feels to me that a plugin for Indigo which can drive a Pi-Z-Wave enabled device is a viable and cost effective alternative.
Not only that but it gets past the ranging problems with z-wave by using IP over wifi/fixed, which in my case is a major problem, but in theory you would build islands of them and control them on a domain by domain basis over IP. Z-Wave repeaters are ok, but bridging zones together with them using such a low power RF device is problematic and not robust
By dis-aggregating the control plane from part of the device connectivity you get a lot more options.
Anyone else playing with a potential plugin framework for Pi/Z-Wave using json?