Aeotec z-stick gen5 general questions

I am about to order either the aeotec z-stick gen5 or the zooz version. Let’s say I get the aeotec z-stick gen5. Few things considering my OpenHAB is running on Ubuntu:

  1. How do you update the z-stick itself or doesn’t it ever get updates?
  2. Since the z-wave devices themselves are not on the internet, how do you do updates when say your smart plug or whatever has a firmware update?
  3. I read horror stories about z-wave and some DB that stores all the device information and if you remove it or it gets disconnected or you do some kind of OpenHAB revert from backup, you loose all your devices and have to reconfigure them all again. Heard there is a backup and restore option. Any information on this and how to do it?

Thanks.

JR

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To the best of my knowledge, the gen 5 stick has never had an update. At least not in the few years I’ve been using it. If Aeon decides to do an update, I expect they’ll provide an update utility. The only issue I’ve had with the gen 5 stick is that it benefits from a soft reset every 6-9 months or so.

Every manufacturer handles this differently. Some manufacturers provide an update utility, some require you to RMA the device, and some never do updates at all.

Any time you restore from a backup, you get the data that was in place at the time you took the backup. If you added devices since the backup, then yes, those devices will be lost.

There is a “breaking” change in the zwave binding between OH 2.3 and 2.4, which requires you to delete and readd all your zwave things. For my network of about 100 nodes that took me about an hour to do. However, this is not a backup-related issue. This only becomes an issue when you upgrade.

When we are talking backup, is this of data stored on the z-stick or within OpenHAB? So in my case if I revert a VM to a prior snapshot would expect anything I did after the revert to be gone. When i read it sounds like the stick looses things not the hub.

So is this an issue ongoing? Or just a 2.3 to 2.4 thing? Sounds like z-wave isn’t the way to go if you have to do this every dot release.

Thanks.

JR

There are of course 2 different things, so if you loose the information in the stick, then the backup of the stick will loose all devices that were added since the backup of the stick. Likewise, if you loose the backup of OH, then you loose all the configuration that is stored in OH since the backup… Different information is stored in different places…

As Mark said, this is only required for 2.3 to 2.4 binding update. If you update between these versions, then yes, you will need to do this. If you are starting from 2.4 or 2.5, then you won’t.

You don’t need to do this for each release.

If you are using the stick on a Linux system like Ubuntu, how do you backup the stick? Note for reference in my system, Windows 7 system running VMWare Workstation that has a virtual of Ubuntu with OpenHAB running on it. And does removing it cause you to loose anything or does the battery backup help with that if it has one?

Thanks.

JR

You can probably use Wine?

Data is stored in NV memory, so you should never loose data anyway. I’ve been running ZWave for 9 years with no loss of data.

The Aeotec stick offer a win only backup feature.
I used it when swapping sticks once. Thought the stick was faulty, but noticed no difference.

Yes, and this should work with Wine shouldn’t it? Or do you mean it will only actually run on real Windows?

Don’t know, but worth a try. I have win machines beside my OH2 Ubuntu so I find it easiest to just use one of those.

If he’s running Win 7 with an Ubuntu VM running openHAB, he should be able to do the backup using his Win 7 host.

So sounds like the only way to backup the Aeotec is in Windows correct? Now wonder if you can back it up if you are using a Windows host but is tied to a linux VM on Virtual Machine. So is the USB stick accessible by Windows once tied to the VM? I’m going to order a bunch of Z-Wave stuff tonight so I guess in a week or two when Amazon ships it I will find out.

Thanks.

JR

Correct.

Yeah, this is the part that’s unclear to me. I don’t know if the stick can be seen by the Windows host when it’s in use by a VM, or whether you need to stop the VM, or whether you can move the stick to a USB port that’s not in use by the VM. I guess you’ll find that out soon. :wink: