I have HA running on an SD card on a Pi3 with an Aeotec ZW090-A USB running on a powered USB hub to get it away from the Pi and provide separate power.
I noticed yesterday that while HA was running, all my Z-Wave devices were offline. I was able to reboot HA and they came back online. This actually happened a few times and I was planning on taking a closer look when I had time. Then, I noticed that HA was offline and not coming back. I dropped power and rebooted and it never came back up.
I hooked it up to a monitor and figured out it was boot looping. It would never load enough to see logs before it would reboot. Then, I disconnected my Aeotec Z-Wave controller and it booted! I plugged in the controller and it froze and then rebooted and went right back into a boot loop. I tried everything I could think of. I plugged the controller back directly into a USB, I tried 3 months of backups, I started HA with no Z-Wave JS UI running and then after it booted, started Z-Wave JS UI and then it would lock and do the boot loop again. I was never able to see anything in the logs but I manged to snap some pictures of what was scrolling across the monitor view.
Here it is after I plugged in the controller with Z-Wave JS UI running or starting Z-Wave JS UI after the controller was plugged in. After the errors you see, I got the next image as this scrolled super fast across the screen:
This looks like some sort of hardware error? Is my Pi3 dying? Has my Aeotec Z-Wave controller died? I have never seen anything like this and searching the forum here turned up nothing.
SD card corrupt? HA seems to run fine until I plug in that Z-Wave controller.
It is usually connected via a USB Powered Hub. It has 4 slots. I have tried each one with the same result. I have tried it connected directly to each of the four USB ports on the Pi3, same result. I have now tried a new SD card and a different Pi3 board. Literally, the only thing left seems to be the Z-Wave stick.
I’m having the exact same issue with a rpi 3b+ icw a Aeotec Z-Stick ZW090-C ever since the 12.3 OS update.
I noticed some BT errors so thought I’d disable that in the config.txt as that’s necessary for some zwave hats for the rpi (not for zwave sticks though). But no dice.
I then started thinking SD card issues as well. I was still running HA on an SD card. But was thinking about moving to a USB SSD anyway I already had ready to go. So made a backup, installed HA on the USB SSD and restored my setup. The install contained 12.1 though so worked like a charm.
But after updating to 12.3 the same issues popped up again.
Can confirm that the bootlooping starts as soon the stick is connected. The CLI starts throwing errors straight after that.
So it seems to be a combination of Pi3(B(+)), ZwaveJS and the Aeotec Z-stick ZW090, but mainly the 12.3 OS update.
Yeah, that sucks. I have tried restoring various places up to 3 months back (that’s how long I keep backups) and I get the same issue now. Is there a way to ‘downgrade’ to 12.1? I have a restore from last fall yet but I have done a bunch of configuration since then and I don’t want to lose that.
I plugged my Aeotec Z-Wave tongle into my PC and ran Silicon Labs Simplicity Studio and the toggle looked fine. I could see my Z-Wave network. I went and bought the Zooz 800 series dongle and will migrate when it comes in.
Ok, I got it working again but I haven’t fixed the problem (whatever it is). I was able to downgrade both the OS and core. I did some digging around on the forums and found some commands that worked.
In the command line I rolled back my core to 2024.4.4 and the OS to 11.5
ha os update --version=11.5
ha core update --version=2024.4.4
Run each of those one at a time and let them downgrade. I plugged my stick back in and it is working! I guess I will stay on these versions until the problem gets fixed.
I have done some further testing thanks to ESPHome messing up my USB ports and me having to restore from backup AGAIN.
It looks like this problem is definitely in the OS version. I can update my Core to the newest 5.4 and Z-WAVE JS MQTT to 3.6 (newest as of this post) and everything works fine. If I go beyond 11.5 on the OS version, everything falls apart and the reboot loops start with all the errors.
I feel like nobody looks at this forum anymore but I figured I would post my findings in case some other lost soul stumbles upon this post.
Thanks for this solution. Very much appreciated. I bumbed into the same problem a couple of months ago and have not connected my aeotec stick since. I just downgraded using the suggested commands and got things running again. Hopefully this issue is soon addressed in one of the next patches.
