I have never observed this, Are you sure it isn't a network problem (switch maybe?)

Interesting! I have moved and have taken down my entire system. It will be a few months before I get a new one up and running but it does indeed look like the noise level is quite a bit lower. Not sure if it is due to reporting differences or if it true noise decrease.

I have been mostly silent on this forum for some time now with the exception of the occasional notifications for questions addressed to me because I just moved to a new house and my system had been rock solid for over a year... mostly since I got rid of the vera.

I now have to re-build everything from scratch in my new house while I had literally zero reliability issues with my previous setup in spite of its complexity (200+ devices integrated running 3 different software platform interconnected between z-way for zwave, Homeassistant for AI/cameras and the rare cloud integrations or integrations not existing on openLuup/vera and openLuup for scenes/automation/control interface.)
I considered long and hard to sell my old home with the automation but at the end I decided to move as much as I could over mostly because I noticed an increasing trend of the industry to go towards wifi for ease of setup but which cannot scale to large installations and have to encroach into wifi bandwidth. It is getting a bit harder to buy zwave and even zigbee devices. I also didn't want to spend the time to go through the learning curve of hubitat which would have yielded no benefit to my setup.
Dumping the vera was the single biggest improvement to my system and please, no ezlo... They are cost reduced and downgraded controllers to the vera in every important practical aspect.

My new setup will be much lighter. Probably will not get to 175 zwave nodes, more likely <100 without the window coverings, fewer lights, fewer sensors. Heck I think I will dump the Phillips hue altogether too. I can't recommend enough migrating away from vera and go to openLuup or MSR in combination with Home Assistant for zigbee and integrations and z-way for z-wave while keeping devices as local as possible by avoiding all the wifi stuff which tend to be cloud dependent (with all their reliability and security disadvantages) and less efficient both in power and RF bandwidth. Still a new adventure...

My ring doorbell fell victim of my cloud dependance eradication project a few years ago, so I can't help with that one. I can only recommend replacing it with the one I am using... Superior in every way by offering a local 3MP RTSP stream, 5GHz wifi. It's already 3 years old but I haven't found anything better since. The only thing I wish it had is H.265 encoding. Mine is still going strong and is integrated into my system. I run facial recognition on it to trigger a variety of scenes on openLuup.
It is the single most active doorbell thread in this forum:
https://ipcamtalk.com/threads/new-rca-hsdb2a-3mp-doorbell-ip-camera.31601/

Indeed! An ethernet network requires a router... or at least you need a DHCP server for these hubs (normally a function of any router and present in most managed ethernet switches).

Euhh, I think something is amiss here. Why running everything off of Zigbee have anything to do with getting internet in the future? If you get a hubitat, your hub will be hubitat. Wifi is just a different type of wireless network communication like zigbee and zwave. They just work on different protocols and frequencies and have different purposes:

WIFI or WLAN is meant for high bandwidth, high power devices like your mobile computer and is meant to offer a bandwidth as close as possible to the wired ethernet (LAN) network it is piggy backed to. Not the most appropriate for smarthomes and especially for battery operated devices because it consumes more power and each device uses bandwidth. Given how little bandwidth smarthome device require, the communication overhead associated with WIFI makes it very wasteful but at this day in age, some people may have plenty of wifi bandwidth to use...

Zwave is a dedicated smarthome protocol which has a fairly good universality mostly due to the fact that it was controller by a single company. Devices tend to be more expensive as a result but prices have been dropping.

Zigbee is another dedicated smarthome protocol but it operates in the same wireless frequency band as WIFI. It is more opened and a lot of companies are involved in maintaining it and therefore has taken off quite nicely.

Zigbee and Zwave require a controller like Hubitat which also need to connect a wired network through ethernet. The controller would have both the radio and small computer on board in which you would setup a software from which to control your devices.
WIFI on the other hand, because of the ubiquity of its use, reuses the radio either on your WIFI router or WIFI access point but usually sends the controlling software out in the cloud so you would need internet access. There are also platforms which enables WIFI devices to be controller locally with a software you would download from the internet.

Internet Access and WIFI are not the same. You can have internet access without WIFI or WIFI without internet access. Typically internet access comes in through a MODEM be it from Cable, Telephone or Fibre. There also now 4G/LTE Modem which enable connection to the cellular internet service which would be slower and more expensive and then output it through wire.

Your smarthome fundamentally doesn't need WIFI or internet access but you do need a home wired network in any case to be able to access your controller. Adding WIFI or internet later has no impact whatsoever on your Zwave or Zigbee setup.

Most of us use both for flexibility. Zigbee has cheaper devices and some devices only exist on zigbee. Z-wave also has some unique devices. Since you won't have wifi, you probably don't care that Zigbee interferes with Wifi but also microwave ovens, BT and most cordless phones.... Wifi is a very inefficient protocol for RF. Z-wave is the most efficient from an energy consumption and RF emission perspective, closely followed by Zigbee. I avoid wifi smarthome devices myself because they are fundamentally a waste of bandwidth and energy.

I didn't test extroot on the verasecure because I didn't have one to try it on. I think others on the forum did it and reported to work fine. There is nothing about the vera secure which makes it perform better than the plus. The extra core is unused... the vera UI is single threaded. It also does not use the CPU enough for the speed to make a difference. Same for the DRAM. The only benefit is the battery which to me would be more of a problem than benefit since they have limited lifetime and prevent me from easily power cycling the unit.

@parkerc

You must have missed my posts there... It has an extra CPU core indeed but the DRAM is unused by the software and the flash drive was catastrophically partitioned... netting less useable space than the Plus. After they got bought and my posts about the disastrous engineering they noodled around the partition with symlink (which I initiated with a script I provided on the forum too). I later moved on to boot the vera off of a USB SSD. I know about the zwave chip only because I dug into it. It makes no difference in functionality as the bridge mode the plus and edge had were not used by the vera. It makes the zwave firmware different though.

Oh gosh... I need to remember this. I think at one point I found the firmware for the chip and using a serial updater, managed to manually upgrade the chip firmware through SSH. That was a long time ago. I think I published how to do this in the old forum but not sure if it's been deleted. At the moment, I no longer have any veras... Also the Vera secure runs on a different/cheaper chip than the vera plus I had.. Why don't you just let the vera run on the dongle?

Using the vera backup process you would have to go up or remain on the same version. If you backed up your vera which is on 6.01 into a stick in 6.02, you should be able to restore onto another vera with an SDK 6.02 and above. Have you tried that? Upgrading the vera?

To answer your question if you have both your controller with the same node ID, it will cause a mess to your network. In that case I would add the second controller so it takes a different node ID. (I ran vera and zway together this way for several months).
Here is the type of mess it will cause:
Controller1: turn the light one
Light: Ok the light is on
Controller2: Got it... euh What? who told you to?
Controller1: Are you on yet? Timeout, let me ask again. Retry!

This will cause the network to be very busy as nodes do not who to report back to or think they already reported and got an ack...

5.33 =5.32 and 5.36=5.37 if I remember correctly. They were just version numbered for Razberry vs UZB.

You should be able to downgrade back... But yeah that's what I feared... Upgrading too far would make it impossible for the vera to restore...

You caught me there. I was probably smarter then than I am now.

My entire system has been working so well that I stopped tinkering or upgrading it save for only occasional additions or optimization of a scene here or there on openLuup. I lost a lot by not practicing.

yep.. that's what I would do.

This is weird... It should be above 6. Not sure what this 4.38 corresponds to. It looks like you need to keep going... Or try it to see if it migrates. You never know.

Before you keep on upgrading, I would recommend to try the vera migration. 29304 is the bootloader I am currently on. So I am not sure what the new bootloader does. It doesn't look like I went down this upgrade path...

Always upgrade bootloader before the firmware. I at times ended in a dead end and ended up having to use the linux tool to upgrades. The Z-way-server firmware upgrader doesn't always offer the "beta" versions which can be a necessary step to another official version. You can see more by inserting an "all" token but I prefer the lower level linux tool...

Note that you may need to go up all the way to do the backup/copy. You just need to get close enough in the SDK version.

Looks like you should be going to 5.26 and then 5.27. These are already 6.xx stack versions though.

UZB/RaZberry Firmwares

Yeah the only way I know of is for me to figure out the spaghetti for you…