Hello. Noob here. I’m hoping someone can help me out. My mother-in-law just bought a new house and moved to Florida. House has a nice salt-water pool and lots of equipment. I have never worked with pool equipment, pumps, etc… but this house came with a Z-wave controller PE653 and PE 953 devices.
The PE 953 remote had some issues and no display. I think it was water logged and exposed to the sun too much. He bought a new remote, as we could not see anything on the screen of the old one. The new one, is bright shiny and new and with version 3.4 firmware. I’ve followed lots of instructions to get this synced to the PE-653 receiver unit. It seems to have worked, but it only seem sto have worked one way. I can turn things on, but they wont’ turn off.
I brought the old remote unit home and tried to get it going. Turns out, It needed a new polarizing filter for the LCD display. I got it installed and could see that the firmware on the old remote is 3.2. So, now I’m guessing the firmware on the PE-653 unit must be 3.2 as well.
I can do the firmare upgrade on my next trip to see them, but I hope someone can tell me… which Windows USB Z-wave dongle do I get to accomplish this? I noticed that Intermatic PE653 recommended Z-wave device is no longer available. I noticed that Amazon has the Zooz 800 Series Z-Wave Long Range S2 USB Stick ZST39 available.
Will this allow me to do a firmware upgrade on the remote as well as the receiver units?
Would appreciate any tips/techniques etc so I can get this going for them.
Well Corky, congrats on your gear, but you’ve unfortunately probably landed in the wrong forum.
This forum is specifically for answering questions around Samsung SmartThings and it’s associated products and projects. As such - being that the SmartThings Hub is it’s own ZWave controller most users here don’t deal with USB sticks etc.
You might have a better result searching in a more general home automation forum?
Also probably yes, but your weakness is going to be whatever those devices are you refer to. This is where a more generic search will help you.
There’s someone in this topic that used a different z-wave stick for the firmware update, so it’s possible. I’d be more inclined to use an older 500 series USB stick for this instead of the newer 700/800 series, but that’s just me guessing. What I found to be the biggest challenge with the Intermatic firmware update utility is that it only runs on Windows XP. I was able to run an XP virtual machine, but it definitely fails on any newer version of Windows.
Other options:
Intermatic may be able to help you out if you contact them directly.
The P5043ME expansion module has a USB port which is another route to load a firmware update. Quick search shows they aren’t cheap though.
Oh man. I’m so sorry! I was unaware this was a Samsung SmartThings forum. I was reading a great thread on the Intermatic devices in this forum and thought it was more of a Z-wave forum than Samsung. My bad!
Philh30 - thank you for the reply and the current information. I’ve not played with Z-wave at all, so your words/advice are golden to me. I had read your posting about running a Windows XP VM to get it to work. I contacted Intermatic company regarding the PE 653/953 and they offered to update both pieces to the newest firmware. Trouble is, I live in a different state than the In-Laws and can’t take the unit off the wall until I revisit them in a few months. I’ll look to see if I can find the older 500 series USB stick and try the GitHub solution… I’m just hoping I don’t run down the “wrong dongle” compatibility rabbit hole!
Going this route you’ll probably have their pool out of commission for a few weeks/months while you wait for back and forth shipping. Removing from the wall means dealing with 110/220v wiring, and possibly a lot of it depending on how complicated their pool setup is. Probably the easiest route for the actual firmware update, but other difficulties.
The GitHub solution runs on top of zwavejsui, which is one of the major zwave integrations used by Home Assistant and has broad compatibility with z-wave sticks. Going this route I’d use a current z-wave stick and not dig up an ancient one. The Zooz 800 series stick is the newest available and has been reported to work fine with zwavejs, though it doesn’t support backup/restore functions yet (which shouldn’t matter for you for this task). I use a Zooz 700 series with zwavejsui for my main hub. The rabbit hole here is that you’ll need to spin up zwavejsui (most user friendly way might be setting up a Home Assistant instance) in addition to using that tool.