TLDR: How can I migrate all my zwave appliances to HA? Can I just plug in the zwave dongle I used in Indigo?
HA has proved just too irresistible - I’m planning on moving from Indigo to HA. However, I have a large number of zwave devices that I currently switch from an Aeotec Zwave Stick Gen 5. My worry is that a lot of these zwave devices are hidden away in the ceiling, built into furniture etc. so pressing the pairing button will not be easy.
Is using these zwave devices as simple as plugging my old Aeotec stick into the machine that will run HA. Or will I have to undertake a whole new pairing process?
Any help much appreciated. I can’t wait to start experiencing HA goodness!
Welcome! You’ll find a lot of Indigo converts here, myself included. Matt and Jay are awesome but it’s just impossible for two people to keep up with the momentum that HA has these days.
I don’t use zwave so can’t help you with that, but Colorado 4wheeler (CO_4X4)is here as well and I think he has a decent zwave setup so perhaps he’ll chime in.
Thanks for the welcome Terry, that’s so kind of you!
I’ve used and loved Indigo for years and I feel kind of liking I’m leaving a loved one but I think as you say there’s just no way two people can match the output of thousands of open source contributors. There seem to be so many extra integrations etc added by the community that I can’t resist it any longer. My Indigo subscription is still active so I’ll keep supporting them for a bit longer yet but the quality of things like the dashboards, metrics etc seems streets ahead in HA.
I dabbled a bit in HA earlier and I must confess that I do worry a little that it doesn’t seem as stable as Indigo, maybe because of the very reason that there are less things being added to the Indigo codebase. Stability seems to be improving all the time and I’m going to start trying to run HA in parallel to Indigo in a HA Green just to dip my toes in the water.
I must confess the Zwave looks to be the most locked-in aspect of moving to HA. Hopefully @CO_4X4 does chime in. He was always a stellar contrbutor in Indigo so I’d love his perspective.
FWIW I haven’t had HA crash in a VERY long time where it wasn’t my fault for doing something dumb, or a hardware/power failure. I honestly can’t remember the last time it crashed for ‘no apparent reason’. My environment is mostly Tasmota and Esphome devices with a few Zigbee motion detectors. As a semi-rule my light switches and dimmers are Martin Jerry devices flashed with Tasmota and anything I make runs Esphome. There are ton of automations and about a dozen various add-ins running. I’m running HA in Proxmox on the 2012 Mac Mini that used to run Indigo and it’s rock solid.
Edit: I haven’t used Indigo in several years now, but I just canceled my up-to-date subscription this year. I wanted to continue to support them as long as I could because I really do like those dudes and wish the best for them.
That was ultimately what made my decision. Matt & Jay are nice guys but they can’t keep on top of emerging technologies the way HA can and, frankly, it was getting a bit pricey and I dare say greedy by the time I left.
They very much are. I miss some aspects of the Indigo dash and had created some insanely awesome themes for them, but HA is eons ahead in dashboards.
Thank you! I enjoyed helping to expand Indigo quite a bit, just as I enjoy helping HA users here as well. Z-Wave, for me, is rock solid. It was a bit iffy at first but you are joining when we’ve moved past the “bad Z-Wave days” of HA and into two systems that are highly stable, well maintained and very mature.
I also wish them both the best, and you held on to your sub far longer than I did. I had three subs with Indigo, although one was a courtesy sub given by Jay for ongoing development, and I timed my migration to HA just when my subs were coming up for renewal.
I’ve transferred ownership of most of my GIT repositories for Indigo to Jay over the past year or so, especially the HomeKit stuff that they really wanted to maintain. I miss the community there sometimes but the community here is amazing and the product is positively fantastic. Sure there are bugs, but every software has them and Indigo had some pretty big whoppers of bugs that took them a while to work out - it is a much faster turnaround here.
Hey C4W, great that you are on here. Feels nice to see some familiar names from the old Indigo days!
Must say I kind of agree with you, I ended up feeling that I was paying a good amount of money and things really weren’t being updated that often. I also felt that users were kind of being told off for asking for updates etc.
But, I must say I had some really good experiences with Indigo at the start and it definitely gave me a good grounding to start off with home automation.
Can I ask you about how you transferred your zwave network from Indigo to HA? I just unplugged the Aeotec stick from Indigo and plugged it into HA. I left all the S1 etc stuff blank and let HA fill that in.
It sees the 23 Nodes that I had in Indigo but the locations and all attributes are blank. I can work out what is on what node from looking at the list in Indigo but I can’t see a way to say eg Node 2 is a Fibaro Shutter switch etc.
Thanks Terry. That makes me feel a bit more comfortable.
I’m also still subscribing but already in the course of a mere couple of hours, I’ve added more advanced stuff than I had in Indigo. Some of the community integrations are incredible.
I tried a straight across move and about 50% of my devices didn’t show up so I decided to just reset the card and start over. Fortunately at that time I had only 25 or so Z-Wave devices because I was still very Insteon heavy, if I had to do that now it would be a nightmare with over 125 Z-Wave, 100 Zigbee and lots of other protocols to add to the mix. Fortunately I ditched Insteon entirely after Indigo.
Okay. Thanks. I guess, I’ll just have to bite the bullet and start over! I find that whole exclusion/inclusion process the worst bit of zwave. I quite like zwave otherwise!
Well, I’ve figured this out. So, let me explain the process in case it will help others in the future. (Bear in mind, I’ve only been using HA for 2 days at this point but this process does work!)
First, I would say don’t worry about taking your zwave stick from Indigo and using it for HA. I did so and the process appears to be non-destructive. I could switch back and forth using the same stick in each different system. Here’s the steps I took:
First find your encryption key which is in this file: /Library/Application Support/Perceptive Automation/Indigo 20XY.Z/Preferences/Plugins/com.perceptiveautomation.indigoplugin.zwave.indiPref
There’s a post detailing the location in the Indigo forums.
Open that file in a code editor and look for “networkSecurityKey”. This is a 16 byte list of integers ie 16 different numbers.
Convert each number to hex by using an online converter eg 191 would be BF, 127 would be 7F etc.
If the number results in a single number eg 7 would be 7, preface it with a 0, so 7 would be 07.
Concatenate all the hex pairs to give a 32 digit code. This is your S0 encryption key.
Plug your zwave dongle into HA and use zwave js to create the hub.
Fill in the S0 key with the hex string you created above. Leave the other fields blank to autofill.
Wait for your zwave devices to appear and the details to fill in. It can take some time.
At some point, I chose to “re-interview” the nodes but I’m not sure that is necessary.
I know this sounds a little complex but take it slowly and be methodical and you’ll get there. It took me no more than 20 minutes to do this and I was able to get every one of my 23 zwave devices into HA with no issues at all and all completely functional. In fact, I’ve noted that HA actually surfaced some additional features that were missing in Indigo.
All in all this is much better than having to manually re-add exclude/include everything!