Posts for the month of August 2016

The TellStick roadmap

Last year we announced two new TellStick. One to be released shortly after the announcement and one to be released later (at an unkown date). The first one (TellStick ZNet Lite) was release but the second (TellStick ZNet Pro) has still not yet been released. Let us explain what has happened since the announcement what the current roadmap looks like.

Let's first start with some history. When we decided to work with Z-Wave we needed some new hardware because TellStick Net cannot support Z-Wave since it lacks the required radio hardware. We wanted to create two new TellStick. One with a good price that would fit most of our users and one for our (hard)core users, a.k.a. "the hackers". To create an affordable product you need to compromise with the hardware. To keep the cost down you cannot add a lot of flash, ram, cpu and other goodies. Instead you need to keep it to what you really need and then optimize the software for this. This kind of product is not ideal for hackes since it can be quite limiting. This is the reason we started working on a Pro model. A model with more CPU, more flash, more RAM, and more other fun hardware upgrades that would benefit hackers.

At the announcement last year the Lite model was almost finished. We were ready to start selling but the Pro model was still on the drawing board. Some prototypes where made but not more than that. Since the development was in such early state we could not give you an estimated time for when TellStick ZNet Lite Pro would be released.

During the year we have trying to find a manufacturing partner for TellStick ZNet Pro. We found that all the goodies we put into the product made it either too hard to produce or to costly. The end price was going to be way to high.

A common misconception was that the difference between TellStick ZNet Lite and TellStick ZNet Pro was that Lite hade only 433 transmitting and Pro had both receiving and transmitting. Even though this is true it was not our goal. We believed the users for the new gateways where users wanting to fully adopt Z-Wave. Since we could add 433 transmitting without affecting the end price too much we thought it was a good idea to add that as well. We where wrong. You clearly wanted both Z-Wave and full 433 receiving and transmitting!

So, we needed to rethink.

First we needed to upgrade TellStick ZNet Lite with receiving 433 capabilities. We will release an updated version in September or October or November 2016.

Secondly, since we have developed both 433 receiving and transmitting for TellStick ZNet (which is a completely different hardware platform from TellStick Net) we got an idea. We removed Z-Wave from it and will release it as an upgrade to TellStick Net. TellStick Net v2 will have the same capabilities as TellStick Net but also a lot of extras from the TellStick ZNet family. Such as:

So, what about TellStick ZNet Pro? Unfortunately this project is currently on hold. We need to redesign this to be able to have the correct control of the quality during production at the right price. We have some experiments and prototypes but this is still far from production ready. Please don't ask us when it will be ready because at the moment we cannot answer. There is still way to many factors. Ideally 2017 but it could also be 2018.

So, you may ask "what about the hackability?"? Since TellStick ZNet Pro is so far away we have been investigating the possibilities for hackability in TellStick ZNet Lite. We are going to open it up for you to add your own code. Actually, the Lua scripting was the first step for this. But I am not going to tell you anyting more about this now, it for future blog posts... ;)