Which Zwave USB stick should I get to update my firmware on the gen 2 red dimmers and black on/off?
This is the one we use and recommend to people!
https://www.amazon.com/Z-Wave-Me-Smart-Stick-Cloud2-Z-Wave/dp/B00VKEH1BQ
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I have one of them. I would say be careful as there is a little bit of a learning curve to it (especially in regards to FW upgrades, Home Assistant installs, etc). I think I am finally over the hump and am overall happy with it now.
It helps to have a raspberry Pi and spare SD card to download z-way’s rasbian image which comes pre-installed with their “smart home” platform. That is definitely the easiest way to do firmware upgrades. Figuring out their firmware upgrade options can be intimidating initially though.
@aolexy If you have questions, feel free to reach out to me if you go that route. I have been through most of the pain points of late with that product 
I have tried three, and they are all the same. Getting one with Zigbee as well is a good bonus.
@Courtney_Inovelli - can you provide a reason why you recommend that one? I’ve seen Inovelli mention it, but not with details.
One thing to note:
If you use HA with these, you’ll want to get the explicit hardware ID, not the generic /acm0, acm1. They change, and troubleshooting hurts These are listed in the same settings where you’d get /acm0 etc. Any tutorial you find will help you use it with HA, but may not point out what I said above.
I’ve been happy with my Nortek HUSBZB-1.
It’s about the same price as a z-wave only stick, but also includes support for Zigbee.
No particular reason that I know of…Eric H used them before I started. I think he said he had used the aeotec ones before and he didn’t like them. These are small and easy to use and have been reliable for us.
Nice and simple methodology, I like it
I just had an incident where my devices were reporting data back to HA, but all commands towards the devices weren’t going out. I don’t know if its the USB stick, but my point being is that all of this stuff has many points of failure, and knowing which are reliable makes a huge difference!
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Sorry for the delay here – I’m going through old threads to tag them properly and/or close them out.
Anyway, to comment further here.
@Courtney_Inovelli is right, I’ve used the Z-Wave.me for the past 5+ years and they’ve been super reliable and have the lowest profile I’ve seen.
I do also agree with @nic if you are using this for Home Assistant or something in that you should find one with Z-Wave and ZigBee built in. This one comes highly recommended as @kelchm recommends: Sorry! Something went wrong!
Hope this helps!
They seem OK with the newest firmware.
You might also want to consider a Silicon Labs SLUSB001A. Pretty cheap, and directly from the makers of the zwave ICs.
The Silicon Labs one works well. I got mine from Digikey, I think.
I ended up getting the zooz stick, and it works well for me.
Just make sure you’ve got the latest firmware installed. Not sure if they’re shipping with the updated firmware or not.