Linear HUSBZB-1

Got it working yay! I have a bunch of old SmartThings devices that have been languishing and now at least the 3 plug in outlets have been put to use. I’m looking forward to being able to get the motion sensors and door sensors added too, though from what I’ve read they aren’t added yet.

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I’m looking for the best solution to have Z-Wave and Zigbee in one go - the Linear HUSBZB-1 looks perfect. The product page does indicate the Z-Wave frequency to be the USA variant. Is there a European variant? Does this mean everybody on this thread lives in the USA? It’s weird I can’t find any indications on this :neutral_face:

From the Operation Manual, the HUSBZB-1 uses 908.42 MHz / 916 MHz for zwave (yep… I’m in the USA!).

What about the newer xiaomi aqara zigbee sensors?

Would they be compatible?

Are they REALLY ZigBee? The current Xiaomi sensors are not 100% ZigBee compatible.

I just found out about this device and ordered one. It will serve as a back up zwave stick at the least, but…

For the ZigBee. Would anyone know what ZigBee Standard it is using? Is it ZigBee 3.0? Or Using ZigBee HA or ZigBee Light Link?

I would like to possibly try and pair the stick to my Osram Lightify RGBW recessed lights if possible.

It’s using (from memory) 5.4 of the Silabs stack which will be ZigBee-Pro.

Shouldn’t be a problem - the binding is being used with a number of devices and I’ve tested against a number of different Osram bulbs.

Device Description
Busch-Jaeger 6711 Relay Insert
Busch-Jaeger 6735 Control Element (1-channel)
Busch-Jaeger 6735/01 Control Element (1-channel, battery-operated)
Busch-Jaeger 6736 Control Element (2-channel)
GE Bulbs
Hue Bulbs Color LED Bulb
Hue Motion Sensor Motion and Luminance sensor
Innr Bulbs note1
Osram Bulbs
SmartThings Plug Metered Plug
SmartThings Motion Sensor CentraLite 3325-S Motion and Temperature sensor
SmartThings Contact Sensor Contact and Temperature sensor
Tradfri Bulbs
Tradfri Motion Sensor
Trust Bulbs note1
Ubisys modules D1 Dimmer, S1/S2 Switch modules

@5iver and @Mike_Bagdanoff

I’m having the same issue as I believe Mike is. I’ve backed up my Aeon Gen5 stick with their software. And then have tried restoring the backup on to the Linear Zstick to no success.

I have the drivers correctly installed for the Linear on a Windows 10 machine. And I have made 3 separate backups, they all show the same size. The restore always says successful, yet zensys tools never shows the nodes.

Can you explain a little how to use zentools to do the shift? I Think it means setting up the Linear as a secondary controller to ‘copy’ the nodes over and then set it to a primary?

Success is the transfer. I was unable to get the Aeon Backup software to do a restore to the LInear Zstick. But the controller ‘shift’ was pretty easy.

For anyone else, there is some good instructions by @higgers here:

Essentially, your adding your new controller as as Node on your existing Gen5 controller creating a secondary controller. Then you do a ‘shift’ to make the Linear the primary and the Gen5 the secondary. Then after that you set the Linear to be Node 1.

When I was done, I actually then just restored by backup file back to my Gen5 stick, and is not my current backup.

I put the new Linear back into OH2 running in a VM on ESXi. Needed to change the port in Habmin to the new setting ( ttyUSB0 for me) and then all nodes in OH2 popped back up online.

Now I’m off to installing the zigbee binding and trying to pair an osram rgb bulb.

I’m requesting guidance for getting the zigbee portion to work with Openhab on the HUSBZB-1 usb dongle, please. I have Raspbian, OH2.4.0 (build 1308) snapshot, and /dev/ttyUSB1 is present. The Zwave serial controller working fine on /dev/ttyUSB0; I just want Zigbee now. :slight_smile:

@Mike_Bagdanoff, @5iver, @chris: Please advise me on how I can get the HUSBZB-1’s zigbee work with Openhab. Thanks so much.

In the first instance I would suggest to search the forum as there are a few discussions about this now and there have been a number of discussions recently.

If none of the other threads help, then please provide some information on what doesn’t work - otherwise we will simply go through the same responses as with the other threads. Please look at the debug logs to see what is up as well.

One of them is the Ember though right? The HUSBZB is an Ember chip so this is the one you need. The speed is 57600 and you should use RTS/CTS Flow Control.

Many people are using the device even if there seem to be some issues with some people.

Thank you again. A restart of Openhab was necessary (for me) to have the coordinator come online. I’m connecting Zigbee devices, cool! Hopefully this will help someone else struggling too.

Suddenly, OpenHAB (or the HUSBZB-1) is no longer operating my zigbee devices, including lights, motion, and door/window sensors. i.e. the lights do not physically turn off/on, and the events.log does not show the state changes of the motion or door/window sensors. Please advise on further troubleshooting steps after reading below.

This started about 2 days ago, but, at that time, restarting OpenHAB resolved the issue until several hours later when it happened again. Subsequent restarts seemed to have helped once again, until finally today nothing. (i.e. Only zigbee is dead, but zwave and wifi devices function fine.) I even restored my last known good backup from July 20th to a clean desktop linux system, and still nothing. The odd part is the zigbee coordinator Thing shows online, as do all of my other zigbee Things show online.

Reluctantly, I removed & reset 1 of my light bulbs. The zigbee binding discovered the “new” device quickly, but it never resolved to the make/model of the device (Sengled Element Touch). I waited and waited, refreshed the Things list after several minutes, and even restarted OpenHAB. Still the Inbox never resolved device’s make/model. I decided to add this “new” Thing anyway, but only to appear as offline, and no channels appeared. I performed the same procedure for my other Sengled bulb and my Osram Lightify bulb, both with identical [bad] results.

I have openHAB 2.4.0 snapshot, Build #1308, raspberry pi 3, and desktop Xubuntu linux.

Thanks for your time to help.

PS: My forum account doesn’t allow me to create a new thread, so I have to post here. :-/

Ping: does anyone have input and ideas as to how/why this happened so abruptly after working fine for 1 month?

Greetings,

So after using “Nortek Security & Control HUSBZB-1”, do you recommend it as zigbee coordinator ?

If no, what is the recommended one for zigbee and z-wave ?

The HUSBZB uses the Ember chipset, and I would recommend this. It’s the one that is receiving the most development, although there are some issues to iron out still…

Thanks,

however, as I can see in this thread and some reviews of the item in amazon. they said the range of z-wave is short and zigbee sometimes is not working.

What about your experience about this product ?

I don’t personally have one (not available in Europe) - I use the Ember chipset for the binding development though, and it should work fine (although as I said earlier, there are still some issues to be ironed out).

I would be a little careful with reading older posts - there have been some issues with getting the stick to work sometimes, and the only thing I can put this down to is possibly slow startup. There was an enhancement made to the driver to retry the startup not too long ago, and I’ve not heard any issues since then so it might be fixed. There are also some other fixes in the next version that should also help Ember users as I’ve been working quite closely with Silabs recently.

Regarding ZWave - most ZWave sticks currently use the same chipset. You might find that range could be less here as the stick is integrated with other hardware (ie the ZigBee chipset) and this will have some impact on the RF performance. The question that has to be asked is if a potential decrease in range is more important to you than having a single, lower cost device - if it is, then buy the two sticks separately, and the range might be better. Personally, I doubt range will be noticeably better with separate sticks, but I’ve not tried it myself.

Just to add, I’m using the HUSBZB-1 with the latest 2.5.0 snapshot build and (this problem existed in earlier builds) every few days for no know reason, my zigbee stuff stops responding. I only use it for zigbee. The sliders and switches to control my items still updates but the lights themselves don’t. Restarting openhab has fixed this without fail until it happens again some few days later.