Z-Stick Gen5 Plus

We have been using this with home assistant for a couple of months to control a dozen switches and dimmers. It has been working perfectly. I was initially going to buy the Gen7 version but research uncovered that the Gen7 chipset if faulty and doesn't handle large z-wave networks well while this Gen5 works without issue on the same z-wave network.When I purchased this the Gen 7 dongle was cheaper. It appears that the buggy Gen7 chips are the reason that Gen7 devices can be found at better prices than the Gen5 devices.

Plugged in, followed Home Assistant's simple instructions, added a device and moved on with my day - you can find cheaper options, but this seems to be reliable so far

I have Home Assistant running on Raspberry Pi 4 with USB SSD, along with this Z-Stick - very specifically Gen5+. I think it's now working and stable.It's not been without pain - when you're automating a home it's fun, challenging, convenient and safe - but when it goes wrong and you're traveling and family is home, it becomes urgent and very inconvenient if the components don't work.I had a previous Gen 5 from experimenting a few years ago. I figured it was time to revive my project so this year I researched again and determined that a Z-Stick 7 was appropriate. It was a disaster - there are known problems, and after upgrading the firmware and seeing the Z-wave network lose it's marbles a couple of times, and a complete reset and rebuild ground-up, research said go back to Gen 5+. I had to ignore the Gen 5 I had sitting in my drawer.So I've spent 3x what I should have on Aeotec for wanting the best of the pick.Now it's working, I'm impressed with the combination, but per the headline - do your homework and be prepared to spend time researching if you have problems.

I had been wanting for months to finally move all of my zwave devices from my old vera lite (which is no longer supported by micasaverde) and give them all a drect link to my home assistant install, which runs in a VM inside proxmox on my dell t30 server. enter this little guy...I couldn't be happier overall so far.just plug this in, set proxmox to pass it through to your VM, and follow the home assistant instructions for getting it up and running. I picked this particular version because of the ability to take it from room to room and pair devices with the stick itself, but it turned out that was not even necessary...I was able to use the add device functionality from inside HA to add all my devices while the stick stayed in the computer. YMMV of course, but I was very happy to not have to carry the stick around the house to get all my devices added.one thing that may be common knowledge (but I'll throw it in here in case it helps anyone else), if you're moving your devices from another controller like I was, make sure you unpair them from your previous controller first before adding them to this stick.overall, I'm very pleased so far. I now have a direct link to HA for all of my zwave devices and as a result they all operate much more quickly, since I don't have to wait for HA to send a command to vera and then have vera control the device. it all happens in one place now! I can also finally retire my 7+ year old vera lite, which was really starting to show its age. a real win-win all around!

This works exactly as expected, with no setbacks or poor performance from it thus far. I would recommend it to everyone who is desirous of using the Z-wave protocol. I have used it with Zooz products and it works great

Support for this device is being cancelled. Has already been for several devices. I bought it for the Nvidia Shield and SmartThings has stopped support for Nvidia. I think others are finding out too. The one I got was an opened box.

Worked out of the box with home assistant on a raspberry pi 4. I disabled Bluetooth on the pi before plugging it into the front USB port of the desk pi 3. Super simple to pair with zwave smart lock.

Hard to integrate if your not a coder! I got frustrated and just bought the SmartThings hub but now I'm tied to the Samsung cloud... The cloud went down for a day an a half last week so now I'm going to go back and try to integrate the Z-Stick once again.Wish me luck!