Aeotec Z-stick, switch, or other zwave issues

Hardware
1

Having weird zwave issues. Running Hass.io on an Rpi, with a Aeotec USB Z-stick as my Z-wave controller. The rest of the network is two in-wall dimmers (one GE one HomeSeer), three plug-in switches (two are Aeotec switches, one is an outdoor Innovelli), and an Aeotec range extender.

Until yesterday, everything seems to be working ok. Since last night though, I’m having all sorts of issues. One switch keeps reporting dead. I initially thought it was the switch, swapped the two switches, the first started working in another location, the second stopped working. Ok, so maybe it’s range (shouldn’t be, it’s one flight straight up from z-stick to that location, maybe 20-25’ total) or interference. Put one 6’ away from the “bad” location, it works, the other doesn’t. Swapping switches which fails. Cursed outlet? Switch still works fine with manual controls, and worked fine 2 days ago, but no connection.

I tried “heal mesh”, “heal node”, “soft reset zwave”, etc. Decided to try rebooting the Pi, via HA. When it came back up, Z-wave was down entirely, with this in the log:

Error setting up entry Z-Wave (import from configuration.yaml) for zwave

3:24 PM components/zwave/__init__.py (ERROR)

I pulled power on the Pi, removed and replaced the stick, powered back up, zwave is up. That one switch still not responding. Did another reboot via HA, zwave is down again, with same log entry.

Here’s the OZW log:

2018-11-07 13:42:54.317 Detail, WriteMsg Wait Timeout m_currentMsg=00000000
2018-11-07 13:42:54.425 Info, mgr,     Driver for controller /dev/ttyACM0 removed
2018-11-07 13:42:55.426 Error, mgr,     Manager::GetDriver failed - Home ID 0xd61e8143 is unknown
2018-11-07 13:42:55.426 Warning, Exception: Manager.cpp:373 - 100 - Invalid HomeId passed to GetDriver
2018-11-07 13:42:55.426 Info, mgr,     GetSendQueueCount() failed - _homeId -702643901 not found

The relevant configuration.yaml section is really simple:

#zwave
zwave:
  usb_path: /dev/ttyACM0

Help?

Off to pull power on the Pi once more…

2

Have you recently updated to the latest version of HA?

If you have then there is a change that was made that they inconveniently left out of the release notes that the zwave USB address is now imported into the core config files and doesn’t use the yaml configuration file set up code. It wasn’t supposed to be a breaking change but several people reported that it broke theirs.

It sounds like that MIGHT be what is happening to yours. Every time you pull power the z stick gets a new device address.

I haven’t updated yet but there is supposed to be somewhere in the GUI where you can modify (or check the configuration of) the z wave USB address.

If I’m wrong then I’m not sure what else it could be aside from a failing z stick maybe. I’m experiencing something similar right now with a failing zigbee stick too.

3

Well, I found the thread, tried to follow the instructions there, and apparently killed HA. It wouldn’t boot at all. Reflashed the SD card and restored a snapshot, and now everything is working fine. I’m suspecting something got corrupted.

4

And now it’s down again. Sigh. I’m starting to really get dissilusioned by zwave. The caseta stuff just works. But I hate to use something that requires cloud connections and is proprietary to a single vendor.

5

I don’t use hassio (for exactly these types of problems that make it hard to properly troubleshoot) but is there a SSH command that you can run to see what the device address of the z stick is on your system right now?

on Linux it would be ‘lsusb’. I don’t know if it works on HassOS or not tho.

6

After poking at the configuration stuff, I managed to make it fail to boot entirely. Reflashing the sd card and restoring a snapshot fixed it, now everything is working again. Sigh.