Best external Z-Wave hub - best device support?

Configuration Z-Wave
41

sweet mate, you have put me on the right path!

I’m checking out the fibaro and aeotec stuff now.

42

I don’t see any advantage of the external hub over the USB stick. The awesome thing about the Aeotec stick is that you can unplug it, take it to the new device, press the button to add the device and then take the stick and plug it back into the RPi. It has a built in battery. Since z-wave needs the devices very close for the initial pairing, the USB stick is more convenient than a plugged in external hub

43

wow, that does make it much easier.

I’ve got so much to learn haha

44

This is not the correct way to pair devices to an Aeotec stick with Home Assistant and it will cause problems. Please follow the instructions here: Z-Wave - Home Assistant

Do note the big warning in the yellow box telling you not do what you are describing:

Don’t use the OpenZWave control panel (OZWCP), or the physical button on a controller , to add or remove devices. Many devices will only send the information about their capabilities at the time you include them. If you use the OpenZWave control panel, or the button on a device, then Home Assistant won’t have that information. Using the physical button on a controller will also result in a non-security inclusion being performed, which may limit the features the device supports.

45

@Chris_Burg this is a misleading comment, in my opinion.
Please do not take his advice as strictly true.

There is a lot of advantage to having an external hub, that I appreciate myself (Referring to the Vera Plus hub that I have owned for some time now):

  • you do not need to re-initialise your z-wave network each time you restart your RPi. This takes a long time, especially if you have a lot of devices.
  • I no not need to touch my Vera Plus hub to add new devices, I open the web interface on my phone, pair the new device and its initialised. I usually restart my RPi after adding a few devices.
  • My RPi for Home Assistant starts-up much faster without needing to initialise Z-Wave each time it starts up. Like, really fast.
  • Your RPi does not get slower the more devices you add to your network, because your RPi has to do all the processing when using the Aeotec stick.
  • You do not need to restart your RPi each time you add a new zwave device to your network.
  • you can cycle your RPi’s power from the Vera Plus hub directly, if Home Assistant has an issue, or the RPi crashes (This happens). I achieve this by having my RPi hooked up to a zwave smart switch, controlled by the Vera Plus hub.
  • You can have other devices control the Vera Plus hub, not just Home Assistant.
  • The Vera Plus hub has Z-Wave, Zigbee and other protocols on the single hub, without needing other hardware or software. All of this is controlled by Home Assistant transparently.
  • You can back-up the entire configuration of the Vera Plus hub separately. I have never needed to restore it yet.
  • Vera has a free cloud service that you can manage your devices and Vera Plus hub without Home Assistant.
    • the free service does not require port forwarding on your router.
    • the free service gives you free push status updates and emails on your Vera Plus hubs internet availability, so you know if your internet has gone down.
    • the cloud service is not required, the Vera Plus hub can be used 100% offline.
  • Home Assistant is synced directly to the Vera Plus hub, so any change there is directly reflected in Home Assistant.
  • I have experienced better device support from the Vera Plus hub than the pythonZWave/OpenZWave implementation used within Home Assistant. I have never attached a device to my Vera Plus hub that has not worked, or needed re-syncing, it handles this MUCH BETTER.

These are all true advantages.

I’m not paid by Vera. lol
It is also worth noting that @sparkydave used an older Vera3 hub, which I have no experience with. His experience sounds like an anecdotal experience, as is mine. Still, I am sure that MOST users have working hubs, or Vera would be in big trouble by now.

Lastly, I loved my Aeotec stick and used it for over a year, but I have had zero issues with my Vera Plus hub.
It has genuinely made my experience better, and Vera deserve credit for how well it works. :smile:

None of this is a knock against the Aeotec stick, it is great for its own use. I still have my Aeotec stick, but don’t use it right now. I’m just saying that the Vera Plus hub is also really good, and I would recommend it to anyone. :+1:

3 Likes
46

Thanks for the info! I decided to give the Aeotec dongle a try anyways and so far it’s workkng very well (only about 10 devices so far). The documentation and user interface for managing z-wave could use some improvements though. One thing you mentioned that I haven’t had to do is restart my RPi3 every time I add a device. Seems to work fine after adding a new device to include renaming. Anyways, just thought I’d mention that for anyone else following this thread. If reliability becomes an issue, I’ll probably give VeraPlus a shot.

47

Yeah that’s fair enough. I forget that Home Assistant added better functionality to refresh. It used to be that a restart was required.

I hope your Aeotec stick works out for you, I started with that and really liked it.

1 Like
48

I tried the Vera plus and yes it’s integrated nice against HA but you can’t add a secure device non-secure on a Vera. That make the hub almost completely uses in my opinion since the secure mode is extremely slow compare to non-secure. Also if you have a non secure controller you can’t control secure devices.

49

I’m on the same route here. I can see four main things that will be important for me in the choice of Z-Wave Controller (HUB).

There are quite a few to choose from; Z-Wave alliance has a long list of devices and controllers for those who want options. https://products.z-wavealliance.org/regions

1. Interpretation of Z-Wave

Home Assistant and some others (…like Domoticz) are reliant internally on OpenZwave (OZW). It’s an open source platform that keeps on developing with all the perks and flaws that comes with it. My experience here is though that OZW doesn’t really fulfil my needs, hence I’m looking for an external code platform.

Looking at non-open source platforms there are several to choose from like Vera, Fibaro and others. My conclusion here is that to be superior to OZW it needs a real company with support behind it and many fall short right here.

2. Device support

The device support is reliant on what Z-Wave stack is supposed to support them.

Homey, Animus Heart, Fibaro, ZNet etc etc… has also their own lists on their homepage.

——

Whats tricky is that many devices are not either fully supported, missing entities or can require one or two a hacks to get them to work correctly. This can be crucial as I read many have slow Z-Wave meshes that are flooded with errors and time outs. Sometimes prematurely people blame the hardware, while their logs are filled with errors and warnings. This is a two edged problem:

  • It can be Z-Wave devices that throw some weird errors or require firmware updates.
  • It can be that the controller has no real support built for the specific Z-Wave device.

So I try to stick to well known device brands, especially when installing things permanently such as In-Wall solutions.

3. Z-wave connectivity (This seems like a popular blame, but I doubt it)

Most devices have either Z-Wave built in or use a stick such as Aeotec. From my experience, this is only part of the equation as performance is reliant on the whole mesh net. When it comes to connectivity; my Aeotec has worked just as well as any other. 99% of the problems have come from either 1. or 2.

4. Platform setup and open integration

This is the reason I have Home Assistant. It has a very wide support of platforms and can integrate with a lot of services. Once entities and sensors are setup, I can mostly run it from HA. I can basically throw around devices, entities and sensors between different platforms and produce good result to the GUI and automations

So basically what I’m looking now on is:

  • Home Assistant running in a container on a dedicated device such as a Raspberry, NUC or something.
  • Vera External Z-Wave Hub for easy Z-Wave integration and good device support
  • Only well known or supported devices in the mesh network

If OpenZwave continues to evolve, I’ll glad throw out the Vera and use the Aeotec + the ConBee sticks instead.

2 Likes
50

This is a great summary of exactly where I’m also at after a lot of trial and error.

Thanks.

51

I’m about to go the other way with ZigBee and replace Hue with ConBee. I wonder if it will be yet another painful experience… :pray:

52

If you haven’t already, I’d recommend checking out zigbee2mqtt.

This is where I’m looking at going, to reduce down my various (Xiaomi/Ikea/Hue) zigbee hubs to a single extensible hub. That way, it’s just my VeraPlus and Zigbee2mqtt “hub”, which seems like a pretty solid combination. :smiley:

1 Like
53

Interesting, worth a separate discussion probably. I’ll look into it. Thanks

54

I think this is spot on, it’s not the AeoTec stick as such, it’s the OZW stack that HA uses to control it.
I believe there is some talk of ripping out OZW, but I’ve seen nothing concrete.

I’m still looking for a local solution where I can do most stuff on HA, including the HomeKit export and off load the ZWave to a more reliable device. SmartThings looks good, but although HA now bridges to this, it does not run locally.

The new Homey looks interesting too, but that might actually replace my whole HA set-up…but it doesn’t have an Ethernet port.

Based on what I see above I think I’ll orde a Vera Edge and control this from HA.

55

I have an Aeotec USBZ STICK running on docker enabled HASS.io an NUC. Just cannot get it to run reliably at all. Sometimes it works after a reboot, sometimes it doesn’t. Totally unreliable.

56

interesting… I have had perfectly stable and reliable use of an Aeotec stick with my RPi3 running HassIO but I’m in the process of setting up a NUC to replace the RPi3… I hope the Aeotec remains stable on the new platform as I have not had any problem with it at all. I guess as a worst case scenario I could leave the stick in the RPi and use it as a remote hub to the NUC… but I’d rather not. I’ll post my findings in due course.

57

When I started with HA, I used a VeraEdge and while it worked OK, I wanted faster response and better control over my devices. I got an Aeotec stick and am using that on a HassIO VM with much success.

I have 44 Z-Wave devices with 40 of them being hard wired, 2 are MiniMotes and 2 are locks. Most of my devices are older Leviton (I have all Leviton switches, outlets and controllers). When I reboot HA, Z-Wave takes < 3 minutes to start up which I find quite acceptable. I don’t have any Z-Wave sensors (they are all hard wired sensors connected via Envisalink).

I did have to do a little work to get my Leviton in-wall controllers working and I’ve documented it at https://blog.gruby.com/2019/01/04/setting-up-a-leviton-vrcz4-m0z-for-use-with-home-assistant/. I have an old Wayne Dalton HomeLink to Z-Wave gateway that I had working on the Vera, but don’t have working on HA/OpenZWave, yet.

I’ve also found that the logs in OpenZWave give me a better feeling of things working whereas Vera was kind of a black box and I had no clue if stuff worked or if it didn’t, why. For instance, Z-Wave associations kind of magically happened for my controllers on Vera whereas on HA, I can explicitly set them. I’ve also had a few devices that drove me nuts in Vera (2 button switches) that I was able to easily get working in HA.

Of course everyone’s mileage is going to vary. Personally I am glad I dropped Vera and have been happy with HA and the Aeotec Stick.

58

are these the Aeotec 4 button keychain ones? I have one but haven’t got it working yet. Wondering if you have any tips…? I paired it but it seems stuck at ‘initializing’… maybe I just need to try the pairing again

59

Not the keychain ones, but I suspect they are similar. I think the trick is to keep the device awake.

See https://aeotec.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/6000035629-in-depth-minimote-guide

Wake up the Minimote

  1. Press and hold the Learn Button (or Join Button) for 3 seconds, then let go. This should keep the Minimote awake for 30 seconds.

  2. Now sending in the configuration within the 30 seconds.

I use Node-RED to handle all the events coming from it.

Hope this helps!

1 Like
60

Thanks, I’ll give it a try