Eric Ryherd has been passionate about home automation since the early X10 days of the 1980s. Eric is an expert in the Z-Wave protocol and can help train your team to design, code and build practical and manufacturable Z-Wave enabled devices. There are many nuances of the Z-Wave protocol that make reliable operation in real-world installations difficult. Eric can help get your Z-Wave product to market quickly with his experience gained from using Z-Wave since 2003. Eric retired in 2022 but enjoys passing his knowledge on to the community thru this blog, the newsletter and other related IoT media.
Questions about Eric or any of his blog posts? Leave a blog comment or contact him at drzwave@drzwave.blog.
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DrZWave 
Hello
Are you the same DrZwave on Amazon?
If you are, I read a review you posted on the LANMU battery power pack for the Arlo camera. You mentioned the power level reading 50%. Is that still the case or did it fail altogether?
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Yes I am. The battery power pack works great for the Arlo cameras. It always reads a battery level of 50% but it never runs out since its plugged into the wall.
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Hello, My team purchased the 500 series development kit and embedded development kit from Digikey ($2300 value combined) about 6 months ago and decided to go a different direction with our product rather than developing it ourselves. We’re looking to get some sort of value out it since everything is still pristine and largely unused. Do you know anyone that we might be able to sell it to for $500 for both?
Thanks,
Grayson
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Unfortunately the 500 series kit is of much lower value now that the 700 series will be available in a few weeks. But I’ll post it here and see if someone wants it. Please contact @grayson directly if interested.
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Is the EZMultiPli still made or sold anywhere?
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Express Controls no longer makes it. Homeseer is investigating manufacturing the HSM200 version but they are currently out of stock.
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Hi. Great blog! Nice to see someone well versed in the slightly opaque topic of zwave internals!
Don’t know where else to ask, so I will try to post here.
Is it normal for recent (500 series fairly new 6.81 API) to send out “Cmd Set Nwi Mode” explorer packets every 5 minutes? I am wondering if this is the controller firmware or the controller software (z-way-server)… Although the controller software does not show anything in the longs at those intervals…
Trying to clean up my zwave network and my understanding is explorer packets are generally not desired since they flood the network…
I have posted the same question on the zwave.me forum ( https://forum.z-wave.me/viewtopic.php?f=3419&t=33704 ) with a zniffer screenshot attached.
Any insight would be appreciated as I am unable to find an answer elsewhere online.
Regardless, thumbs up for the blog… Will be following along 🙂
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A controller should not be sending Set NWI Mode unless it is in Inclusion mode. You don’t want the controller stuck in Inclusion mode all the time as that could cause a node to either be added or excluded when you didn’t want it to be.
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A little late to reply but you are correct.
There was an issue with the USB (Zwave.me UZB) adapters firmware… They have since fixed it.
The adapter would initialize (start up) in inclusion mode.
Thanks for the reply though, love the blog!
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I want to write firmware for a device I own. Is it possible for me to do so
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It might be possible to write firmware for an existing device – but it won’t be easy! If it’s a 500 series device, you’d first have to purchase the Keil C compiler which is very expensive. If it’s a 700 series device, you can use the free Silabs Simplicity Studio IDE and the GCC compiler. You’d have to erase the entire chip and build the software from scratch. You’d need the schematics to know what GPIO is wired to what.
I would suggest that it’s much easier to build your own custom Z-Wave device from the Thunderboard DevKit (DK2603A) than to alter the firmware on an existing device. See https://www.silabs.com/development-tools/wireless/z-wave/z-wave-800-dev-kit?tab=overview.
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