Huge thanks to @chris for absolutely everything going way back such a long time. Sorry to hear the first binding cost you so much money.
I would gladly contribute money toward funding access to the new specification.
I agree that not (ever) supporting the new series is a “going out of business” plan.
OH and HA can coexist – there’s no need to switch everything over at once. If necessary you could run ZW700 stuff on HA for a while until OH catches up, or other combinations. Just in case anyone is thinking the worst.
And a bonus unresearched random thought… if HA supports the new spec version and is also open-source, is there a way to copy or leverage the source code from their repository?
I hope it works well for you! This isn’t a competition, so rather than one being ahead of the other, I think it’s better to say that every system (not just OH and HA) has its own strengths and weaknesses. In this case, HA has strength with respect to Z-Wave 700.
All that matters is that each of us uses what’s best for us.
Unfortunately, the way the foundation is established legally in Germany, it is legally forbidden to fund this sort of thing.
My understanding is that HA uses an external Node.js service similar to zigbee2mqtt. I can’t imagine that OH couldn’t use it too, but it wouldn’t be a native binding.
At a minimum it would require porting it to Java which isn’t always easy.
Sorry, but before posting such a comment, you should inform yourself better about the constitution and purpose of the openHAB foundation.
As @rlkoshak already pointed out, this is not possible.
The problem is that this is a fair assumption - that the OpenHAB Foundation is there to promote and improve the openHAB software. This was exactly the issue I had - people said "well, I’ve donated to the foundation, and that’s there to fund the software, so why should I give money to support ZWave’.
We are a non-profit organisation with the mission to educate the public about the possibilities and benefits of free and open smart home solutions.
Sorry - I know that’s off topic, but since you raised it … This is to some extent why Home Assistant has jumped ahead in leaps and bounds in recent years - they have a system that puts resources into developing the software…
Just for reference some excerpts from the statutes of the openHAB Foundation (machine translation):
§ 2 Purpose of the association
the purpose of the openHAB Foundation is the promotion of consumer advice and consumer protection regarding Free Software for home automation, in order to promote the free exchange of knowledge and equal the free exchange of knowledge and equal opportunities in the access to such software as well as the such software and to support popular education.
the purpose shall be served in particular by:
a. the ideational support of governmental agencies and private organizations in all questions concerning free software for home automation,
b. the dissemination of the philosophical ideals of Free Software,
c. to inform and educate the public about the possibilities and the educational potential of Free Software in home automation, e.g. by producing flyers, documents flyers, documents, publications, and hosting events.
The initial discussion about the openHAB Foundation can be found here.
Sorry Chris, It is not.
The constitution says education.
Therefore the foundation cannot put money into development, otherwise we would loose our non profit and special tax state.
This is a really complex/complicated system with foundations in Germany.
Me as the CFO have always to make decisions on what we can spend the money to not put the non profit (charity) state at risk.
We already had some trouble with tax authorities in the past,
Believe me, the board would love to put money in development or support devs in that direction, but we can’t.
However, I think you missed my point. My point was that if people don’t bother to read the constitution, and many won’t, then I think it’s a fair assumption that people will think that the openHAB foundation is there to support openHAB development. In fact, it’s not - I understand that this is clear in the constitution - I was certainly not saying it wasn’t. I’m just pointing out that many people think when they are supporting the OH foundation, that they are supporting developments and developers - this is the issue I had previously as people thought that by donating to the foundation, they were supporting my costs to get the information from the Z-Wave Alliance.
I appreciate the OH foundation is doing something different - largely unrelated to the openHAB project in many ways and I wasn’t trying to suggest that the foundation can support developers - just that unless you read the fine print (ie the constitution) I think it’s likely that people will think otherwise.
personally I love openHAB because of it’s stability and wide and wise approach to the opensource. I use a lot of zwave and, to be able to work with gen 7, i moved to zwave-js-ui then via mqtt talk to OH. sure, it’s less comfortable then an internal binding, but it works well.
What benefits did you see when you started to use the gen 7 controller? I have 30 or so Zwave devices and am interested in any benefits the gen 7 controller could provide.
in the past i was ising z-stick gen 5, while 700 controller is z-pi 7 (both are aeotec), so not only different controller but also different way to plug into my controller. z-pi7 is more more fast and the mesh is more stable. i think that going directly via rs232 instead of usb is significant for the speed. at protocol level i don’t know if zwave-js-ui performs better than the OH binding.
In general, there are limited benefits. The protocol radio channels are the same - the maximum radio speed is still 100kb/s. The radio performance is slightly better, but probably not something that people will notice. The processor used is better, and that may help in some areas, but again since the protocol is generally very slow, it is unlikely to make any significant difference.
It will not improve the speed at all. While it might increase the RS232 speed, this would be dependant on the controller and not related to USB since USB can run much much faster than RS232. However in general this won’t make any significant difference since the protocol speed is mostly governed by the radio channels which have not changed for a long time.
You’ll also find some comments above from @apella12 -:
Thanks for the info. I don’t think I’ve seen any significant benefits stated anywhere and you’ve just confirmed that. Even if the gen 7 controllers had better range that would only work in one direction unless they also had significantly more sensitive antennae. I.e., the controller might be able to talk directly to more devices in the home but messages from those devices will still take two or more hops to get back to the controller.
In short, I’m not seeing a compelling reason to upgrade my gen5 to a gen7 controller at this time.
If I remember correctly, the receive performance is also improved, but it’s only a couple of dB and IoT sensors (etc) tend to be limited more by other factors (environment, poor antennas etc) so the improvement, while “real” in the lab is not likely to be noticeable in the real world.
I would certainly not be upgrading a working system on the hope that it will be better with the gen7
That sounds very sensible to me. If I had coverage issues I think I’d look into moving the controller to a more central position in the building first.
Or get a mains-powered Z-Wave device that can act as a repeater. I recall someone saying that they bought a Z-Wave wall plug for less than a dedicated Z-Wave repeater.
As mentioned earlier in this thread, the biggest concern is that 500-series controllers are going out of stock and being replaced by 700-series controllers. I was going to say “slowly going out of stock”, but I just had a quick look on Google/Amazon and I can’t find any (reasonably priced) 500-series controllers in Canada. I only have about eight Z-Wave devices in total, so it’s not a big deal for me to switch to Z-Wave JS UI or ditch Z-Wave in favour of Matter/Thread/Zigbee. However, that could be painful for others.
Which brings me back to:
It seems to me like it would make sense to adopt Z-Wave JS for future implementation of 700-series controllers, while maintaining the Z-Wave Binding for legacy purposes. This would give us a path forward for new/existing users, while also reducing the burden on Chris and the few others in the community who have enough expertise to support Z-Wave (I am not one of them).
If it were possible to include Z-Wave JS in openHABian (which already includes an MQTT broker), we’d have a solution that is more complex than a binding, but will perhaps be easier to maintain due to the independent development of Z-Wave JS. It would be similar to using ZigBee2MQTT or Tasmota/MQTT.
I’m pretty far out of my depth on this suggestion, so feel free to tell me that I don’t know what I’m talking about. I really don’t.
That’s a very important point. This would lead to the current zwave binding effectively becoming legacy technology simply because of the hardware availability of controllers that can be used with it. Eventually even availability on eBay will dry up.
I don’t know know how foundations works in your country, but if you can’t finance the development, and you can’t finance the items needed to develop and maintan the system(like the api’s, and other things what are needed in the future), than for what can you use the money? I can’t imagine that nothing from this could be financed.
Just to give you a short answer.
Who do you think is paying the servers running this community or the free myopenHAB service ?
It is paid by the foundation.
But I am not going into more details how the foundation spends the money, as this is closed information for members.
I would certainly not be upgrading a working system on the hope that it will be better with the gen7 
If I had coverage issues I think I’d look into moving the controller to a more central position in the building first.