Drivers and Hardware List

[wusupwchu]

Dean,

   Is there a list somewhere of Z-wave hardware that there are working drivers for, so that as I buy switches and sensors and such, I can know what will work?

[Dean Roddey]

Well, that's sort of a subject in flux right now, because I'm way into creating a much more extensive, native Z-Wave driver right now. So, what is supported will pretty soon be really about what that new driver supports. It's being written such that it should be able to support most anything.

It will be able to generically handle a lot of stuff. And we'll add specific support for more stuff over time. Most stuff won't require an updated driver, just a 'device info file' that we can set up and send to folks to try out without having to do a new version of the driver. Though, something way off the beaten path will require explicit support in the driver, i.e. code written just for it, which would require a new version of the driver.

I would say, at this point, that there would be very little indeed that would not be supportable. But, don't get anything that doesn't support associations and sending out of asynchronous notifications of changes in state. Most everything these days does allow for that. But, anything that doesn't we'd only support for one way control, i.e. sending out commands to, but not trying to get the status of it.

Mostly what will happen is that, for the bulk of devices that we've not seen before, you'd just select a generic handler and provide it a little info. That will get you what you need. You can then use our driver to gather some info for us that would let us set up a specific device info file for that guy. That wouldn't likely make more functionality available, it would just make that make/model specifically listed in the available unit types, which would just make it more convenient since it wouldn't need you to tell it how to set itself up.

If it's some unusual device that doesn't play by the usual rules, we'd have to use that info to write specific code to handle that device type, and that would require a new driver version.

[znelbok]

What "hub" are you recommending or does that not matter with this up coming driver?

[Dean Roddey]

It works as a secondary controller like the current one, but uses a Z-Stick. The Aeon V5 one is what I'm testing with so I'd recommend that obviously, though in theory it will work with any raw interface type Z-Stick'y controller. You would use whatever you want for the master controller.