Nice post. Thanks for sharing it here.
Did Sigma Designs just file bankruptcy? I saw an article indicating their were in liquidation, which is how the Brits phase bankruptcy. (Edit, read better article, sounds like they are selling off business units, stock still trading.)
And either way it sounds like they sold off Z-Wave to Silicon Labs. Hopefully the engineers make the move - it is not good to have doubt cast on the z-wave standard after all the progress made the last few years. I saw an article that the Bluetooth SIG was excited about the uncertainty and how it would play into their mesh network plans…
Having Z-wave in the hands of Silicon Labs will be positive for the Z-Wave community. They are planning to be a key IOT player in Wi-Fi, Z-Wave, BT, Zigbee, etc.
Dear lord if Bluetooth becomes the dominant IoT standard, I quit.
Dear lord if Bluetooth becomes the dominant IoT standard, I quit.[/quote]
The BT SIG would like the BT LE Mesh to be the new IoT standard. The BT LE Mesh was defined by the BT SIG in the summer of 2017, and the first certified stacks came out at the end of the year. I personally have a lot of doubts, based on continual BT interoperability issues (not just mesh, but in general.) Realistically, Wi-Fi, Zigbee, Z-Wave, Thread, BT Mesh (not to mention many proprietary solutions) will find a place in IoT. Silicon Labs plans to be able offer solutions for each. It’s a reasonable business plan,given the Wild-West aspects of IoT.
I wanted to go off-topic yesterday, but am committing today:
I think BT LE was added by BT SIG after discussions with EnOcean, but I can’t find the link from several years ago. More recent links…
My Vera is about one-third EnOcean - all of the 20+ Occupancy Sensors. So while BT LE and Z-wave 700 talk about shooting for 10 year battery life, most of my sensors are solar powered. I do install back-up batteries that have a 10 year life, but those in rooms with natural light work without the battery…
Just ordered a 700-series UZB for testing. It’s supposed to be backward compatible but not sure if the serial interface is. Will be interesting to see the vera can handle it.
Just got the 700 series stick and it works on the vera using the same serial API. It just doesn’t have the tools to restore the network data into the sticks NVM so I have not tested it on my network yet.
Some interesting reading
https://aeotec.com/z-wave-home-automation/z-wave-700-series.html
Edit: Actually it does not work on the vera plus. It does on my vera plus emulator. There must be some hardware support or USB driver difference between the two as my emulator runs on a newer kernel…
Hopefully this is the first fruit of the Silicon Labs era for Z-wave.
I will send these to you later today.
Sent! It looks like it is using a very generic CP210X USB to UART driver but I know that for windows there has been quite a few version changes over the years. When I direct the vera to it, it goes on to reload 3 times and then gives up. On the simulator, it reads it fine and I get a version 7.0 L:7. The only difference is the driver embedded in the kernel I believe.
Well I monkeyed around with between two sticks and managed to turn my 700 stick into the primary SUC/SIS on my network. The problem, inserted it into my emulator but there are a number of other problems. Though it seems to send frames out ok, it’s not getting the ack so I can see it turn lights on, the luup engine times out.
A bit of a necro thread but I did not want to start a new one.
I found interesting that the next gen Atom will have the 700 series chipset so I went snooping around what is available and/or certified.
Well before that I found this:
https://products.z-wavealliance.org/products/3073?selectedFrequencyId=2
Which is a circa 2018 of the Atom, at that time named the ZL-100 by ZLINK, the predecessor of eZLO.
There aren’t too many 700-series products at this point. One of notice is this controller from Aeotec which unfortunately also appears very cloud dependent:
https://products.z-wavealliance.org/products/3691?selectedFrequencyId=1
Ohh and look what I found: SMART HOME by hornbach Gateway bei HORNBACH kaufen
A vera plus clone which supports S2 security… 
Hi Raf,
I can see they have that in NL as well. For just €80,-! Also their other Z-wave stuff is priced nicely. Not much info on specs or anything.
Cheers Rene
They actually have quite a bit of documentation you can download from the site. I even read through the manual. it is in German though. The device is a Sercomm G450 which is what the vera plus is. It just runs a different firmware. I got to it doing a search for S2 controllers on the zwave alliance site. I know Bosch also offers a version of the G450 and it practically runs a version on the Mios firmware.