Z-Wave Developers and Marketers will come together at the Z-Wave Summit at the Jasco facility in Oklahoma City September 26-28, 2017. You have to be a member of the Z-Wave Alliance to attend. I highly recommend attending if you are developing Z-Wave devices . Networking with other Z-Wave developers and having intimate access to the Sigma Design and Alliance engineers and marketing folks is invaluable. To attend, register via the Alliance member-only web site. The Alliance always has some fun in the evenings too so it’s not all work!

Eric Ryherd Presenting

Express Controls founder and Z-Wave expert Eric Ryherd (aka DrZWave) will be presenting at the summit for the 4th consecutive year. Last years presentation was “Seven Things you probably don’t know about Z-Wave” and was well received. I was surprised how many engineers were completely unaware of the many new features and command classes that have been added to Z-Wave in the past couple of years. This year’s topic is “IoT Device Testing Best Practices“. I’ll go over some of the failures I’ve found over the last several years in both my products and other products I’ve tested.

Abstract

Z-Wave wireless Internet of Things (IoT) devices are hard to test! There are countless devices already in customers hands with bugs in them that make Z-Wave seem unreliable when in fact many of the issues are bugs in the device firmware.  Eric Ryherd, Z-Wave expert and consultant, describes some of the  failures that are still shipping today and best practices when testing your IoT device to reduce the chance your device fails in your customers hands. Simple command sequences sent one at a time by a test engineer is not representative of the real world packet storms that occur in an apartment building with complex RF reflections and multiple interfering RF networks. Your device has to work in the real world and to do that you need to simulate those terrible conditions that do not happen on the engineers desk.

Author Bio

Eric Ryherd licensed Z-Wave in 2003 to develop IoT devices before the term IoT even existed. Light switches, motion & temperature sensors, water valves and meters, hubs, window shades, remote controls are just a sample of the Z-Wave IoT devices developed and tested by Express Controls. Eric applies his Z-Wave expertise in consulting, training and assisting with Z-Wave Certification to companies of all sizes. Read more by Eric at his blog – DrZWave.blog.