has anyone managed to get one of these boards to function, I'm obviously missing something...

Although the OPi+ and RaspberryPi headers are similar, the GPIOs are not exactly matching, so maybe you will need to tweak the software accordingly.

 

You can also purchase the zwave.me USB dongle and use OpenZWave software (which is what I did) .

 

 

EDIT : While working/answering this other thread http://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/987-rxtx-uart-problem/, I've suddenly got a flash in my head :

If this Razberry board only using UART3, then it is simply that those are not enabled by default in either FEX (Legacy) or DTB (Mainline).

In this other thread, I've provided a new DTB for OrangePi-PC.

yeh , already got a aeon dongle, but also a couple of razberry boards which id like to use whilst testing and migrating to openhab2 on the OPi+ i cant for the life of me work out whats missing, its some combination of PL0*, amba and ftdi drivers but i cant seem to chosse the right kernel options to get the amba drives loaded. 

managed to get legacy working.. needed to edit the fex file for uart3 and comment/uncomment appropriately. But the zwave.me seems to insist on seeing a ttyAMA0 device - so one symlink later....and all appears to be working... now for kernel 4... 

For the kernel 4.x.x, the DTS for most UARTs except 0 and 1 were disabled. I've done a patch and submitted it to linux-sunxi mainline :

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/linux-sunxi/yYs-9KBrVEg

You can do the same on your side, it will allowed the UART3/4/5 ...

 

For the ttyAMA0, you can create a udev rules that will create that for you.

On my side, with a zwave.me USB  dongle, I've done that to create an even easier named symlink : /dev/zwave

SUBSYSTEM=="tty", ATTRS{idVendor}=="0658", ATTRS{idProduct}=="0200", SYMLINK+="zwave", GROUP="martin", OWNER="martin"