Since there was some chatter on this in another thread I just wanted to do a post to make it clear. We did finish taking care of all the ‘fixable’ issues that were reported with the 1183 beta, and have a new release available for the ‘power users’ to replace the 1047 release from last summer. But, as mentioned in another post, over the past couple days Sigma asked us to go to Denmark at the last minute to work directly with their engineering team to resolve the various Z-Wave issues that have been plaguing everyone. This is diverting all our attention away from the release.
But, this is great news for us and our users. There have been a bunch of Z-Wave issues that have been outstanding for up to 2 years. Problems with ‘No Z-Wave’ and ‘Failed Configuration’, long delays when turning on/off devices, missed events from door locks, failure to complete heal, etc. We know this been very frustrating for a lot of users. Some of you have even written Sigma asking them address them. It’s paid off.
Assuming we can get a new firmware for the Z-Wave module from Sigma, we’ll include it in our next release as soon as we get it; hopefully very soon. The Z-Wave modules in all Vera2’s are automatically upgradeable and will get the fixes without any intervention. For Vera 1 users, nearly all the USB Z-Wave dongles are also firmware upgradeable, although it will require inserting the dongle in your computer and running some software which we will post on this thread.
We’re also pushing hard for a Z-Wave firmware that supports manual routing too. Z-Wave is a mesh network, meaning messages bounce around from node to node until they reach their destination. Right now, the route those messages take is totally outside of our control; it’s entirely handled within the Z-Wave module. Often times the routes taken are dead-ends leading to long delays or failed delivery. The new manual routing feature means that whenever your Z-Wave network is idle, Vera can do tests of nodes, probing various routes until it finds the most reliable ones, so that over time your system becomes more and more reliable.
Naturally we’ll be transparent with the issues, and let everyone know what can be fixed by a Vera firmware update vs. a Z-Wave firmware update.
We’re quite hopeful that when we finish this exercise with Sigma next week you’ll get a new release that’s significantly more stable.
