Zooz already has a Z-Wave 800 Series USB stick LR and GPIO board LR available. By the time @chris is ready to look at rewriting the Z-Wave binding the 800 series may be more widely available. 
Sorry I can’t do this quicker - I’m just quite busy at the moment.
However as far as I know the API will not change for the newer devices, so it will still be applicable.
No apologies ever needed, Chris. Your time is as valuable as everyone else’s, and you’ve done a huge amount of work on behalf of the OH community. I think that everyone who’s expressing frustration about 700-series controllers is speaking to an unfortunate reality that none of us are comfortable with–not questioning your efforts.
And I’m pretty sure that @bjsjr was making a light-hearted joke about leapfrogging straight to the 800-series controller…because I thought about making a similar joke earlier today.
Personally, I don’t plan to ditch my Z-Wave devices (and actually just bought a new one). However, if Matter/Thread delivers on its promised ease of use (a big “if”), I expect that it will become the dominant consumer technology.
In the meantime, if someone comes along and absolutely has to have a 700-series controller, then I’ll happily point them to Home Assistant. My goal is simply to help them with their home automation, whether it involves openHAB or some other platform.
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Absolutely!! No malice intended. I have nothing but appreciation for @chris’s work.
I was surprised to see the 800 series controllers on Zooz’s site already and figure they probably need time to mature anyway. I’m looking forward to seeing how accurate the “up to a mile” range is. 
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Just wanted to give my 2 cents
I have been tagging along for the last 7ish years, and lately seeing some issues with my Aeotec Z-Stick 5 (not the + one). Therefore, I went to get a new stick, and apparently did like the aforementioned Noob and just bought the latest Z-Stick 7. Ooops.
I definitely appreciate all the work being done by @chris as the automated home is a part of our lives now in Denmark, where even the wife appreciates it. 
What threw me off regarding the Z-Stick 7, is that it actually seems to be detected by OH, so i did spend a few hours excluding and including a device trying to move it to the new stick.
Suggestion
Would it make sense to somehow remove support for the Z-Stick 7, or flag it as being unsupported if indeed added as a controller?
Finally - thanks for the huge work being done here - much appreciated.
31 Z-Wave devices / 30 Zigbee / MQTT / Samsung / Etc.
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Does that work really mostly because of zwave-js-ui? The older HA zwave addon is deprecated and the new one just uses web sockets to zwave-js-ui. But zwave-js-ui also has a MQTT function which could be used to the support 700 series on OH. I’m still using my old Aeotech Gen5 so I haven’t had time to play with it.
Your effort and support is highly appreciated by the community using the Z-Wave binding.
It should not be at the cost of a maintainer to fund such memberships or access to documentation. It shall be at the cost of the foundation.
I personally have now moved my home to Home Assistant.
Thanks openHAB community for the support, that allowed me to run my home reliably most of the time during the last 4 years.
When I started openHAB was way ahead of any other platform. Meanwhile it is way behind Home Assistant and I personally do not believe it will catch up again.
My 2 cents:
- 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.
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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…
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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.
Sure - I understand.
Again, I understand.
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.
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Indeed, missed that point and this is very valid.
In that case, it is a fair assumption.
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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.