I can understand the frustration and have seen that in some of the other posts lately as well. There’s a lot of moving pieces around zwavejs so it can be tough to keep up, but overall, for me at least, I’ve been much happier with it over the old openzwave.
That being said, starting over in zwave can be a bit difficult. The controller usually has a battery, and stores information about the zwave network. So just uninstalling the software won’t clear that out. Each node also stores information about the network.
If you want to avoid the “nuclear option”, maybe you can share some details on where you are at now? What’s your install type, and which add on are you using? What kind of devices and zstick so you have, and if so, are they included and/or functioning right now?
If you do want to blow it all up and start over, you need to:
1- Try and exclude whatever devices you can from the network first.
2- remove zwavjs integration and add on, then restart Home-assistant
3- remove any orphaned entities that are still in Home assistant.
4- factory reset the zstick. If it’s an aetoec zstick, it has a battery. Unplug the usb first, then follow these directions
5- factory reset any zwave device you couldn’t exclude. Follow the manufacturers directions
At that point, you will have everything fresh to startover.
After that, you really have three options to integrate zwave in Home Assistant if using a hassio install with addons:
1- the officials zwavejs addon using the zwavejs integration.
2- the zwavejs2mqtt community addon using the zwavejs integration through websockets
3- the zwavejs2mqtt community addon using an mqtt broker and mqtt integration.
This explains the options a bit better
I would recommend you install zwavejs2mqtt as an addon vs zwavejs, and use the websockets zwavejs integration. Zwavejs2mqtt has more advanced configuration options, including its own UI control panel, which can help with advanced diagnostics. Zwavejs2mqtt will show as a “community addon”, but has more functionality at the moment then the official zwavejs addon.
Unless you need mqtt, you can disable the mqtt portion and just use the websockets- that’s what I’m doing. Here’s what it looks like in zwavejs2mqtt settings
Install instructions for zwavejs2mqtt are here:
Hopefully this helps and doesn’t just add to the confusion. Let me know if you have questions or run into issues.