Just an update for everyone. I’m in the process of importing every single certified zwave device into Zwavejs2mqtt and node-zwave-js (the new server backend). I’m about 98% finished and working on bugs now so confident it’ll work. It’s a few hundred additions and revisions to around 1,000 device files representing devices from all over the world (after accounting for model changes…its 4,700 entries total). In talking with the maintainer, our goal is to have it auto-PR newly added devices each week or so. At the moment the database even includes pre-release devices so hopefully device file issues become a thing of the past.
From switches to bulbs to thermostats to mousers and graters (whatever the hell they are…the Russians have some interesting devices), we’ll have device files for it all.
Thanks so much! Very nice to see how you have on the one hand been passionately advocating for the need to do something about the deadlock position Z-wave for home assistant was in (with qt-openzwave not moving forward), and on the other hand are now with an equal amount of passion contributing to implementing to the newly defined roadmap.
Given the flurry of activity I’m seeing and the speed of development, I wonder whether my choice of starting off with the current (outdated) native integration is the right one. Perhaps in a few months zwavejs will already outperform the native integration on almost all fronts. In that case I would simply wait a bit longer with migrating my z-wave devices to Home Assistant.
Perhaps in a few months zwavejs will already outperform the native integration on almost all fronts. In that case I would simply wait a bit longer with migrating my z-wave devices to Home Assistant.
Definitely a possibility, though we’ll see how many bug reports we get after the 2021.2 release
Right now migration between the integrations would be completely manual. Depending on how many devices you have (and what kind of devices) it may or may not be worth it yet. I’m not sure if anyone is running the new integration on a large “production” network yet, most of us have been using smaller test Z-Wave networks.
I’d hold off on manually submitting them. I’m about to import a ton of devices so it’s likely wasted work and a fair chance it adds more work to me to reconcile conflicts.
FWIW I have 31 devices, 10 different device models (switches, dimmers, motion sense lights, energy monitor plugs, motorized blinds, door sensors) and it’s running smoothly. There’s devices that are not OZW 1.4 compatible which is why I tried out the alternatives (ozw, zwave2mqtt, zwavejs2mqtt). Currently deployed with docker on one host and hassio on an Rpi. Zwavejs works for me right now, and I see lots of activity on bug and feature requests. I like blwhoward2’s work on importing from the compliance source, I think that’s going to be a material benefit compared to OZW.
I like blwhoward2’s work on importing from the compliance source, I think that’s going to be a material benefit compared to OZW.
FWIW, OZW also did a big import of configuration info/metadata from the Z-Wave compliance docs, but I’m not sure how often they’ve been refreshed (if any) since the initial pull a year or two ago.
@cgarwood Yeah, I can tell when the labels line up exactly. It had to have been a while ago and they don’t appear to have used them to error correct what they already had in place from users creating them manually from other files.
Right now we’re using openHAB files which are more out of date. Fishwaldo hasn’t responded about requests to use ozw’s files. We may run those through too but this way doesn’t require worrying about whether the license protects them at all or arguably incompatible licenses so I started with this.
You have personally helped me get things working throughout your project. I want to thank you for everything you have been doing and thank you for the work that has made home automation really work well.
I wholeheartedly understand where you are coming from and, frankly, have handled it better than I ever could have. I hope that maybe some people will see this and take the time to consider the people behind libraries and services.
So, again, thank you so much for your work; you deserve to feel as if you’ve accomplished something great.
Fishwaldo,
You have contributed massively to HA, you have helped many many many people here on the forum, including me You owe us nothing.
We owe you a huge debt of thanks
I don’t really care what is happening in your personal life other than to wish you well, both now and in the future. (though I’m sorry about your gear, I weep for their little silicon souls)
You have a right to both a career and a personal life and anyone who criticises you is saying more about ‘them’ than about you.
@Fishwaldo Thank you Justin for all your hard work and contributions. It was through your unsung efforts that I was able to migrate my Z-wave NW from a Vera Hub (which is a paid product being dead-ended) to Home Assistant.
Overall I would say my z-wave is definitely faster and more devices are supported thanks to your hard work than Vera did. Are there occasional stability hiccups… sure… but no worse than I had before and I know much more about what is going on now than I previously did.
This is really sad. Reading this thread… it’s the first time since I began with Home Assistant in April 2020 - after adding 75 ZWave devices, with 541 entities, all renamed consistently, 28 well-tested automations and 7 supporting scripts, all working well under zwave 1.4 - that I truly am disillusioned with the project.
I pay Nabu Casa every month to support the core development team and, color me silly, but I would consider ZWave a pretty core component of HA, especially in keeping with HA’s philosophy of keeping things local, unless running wires is your thing. I’ve tried to keep things simple and chose to standardize on ZWave. I don’t use Zigbee, WiFi, or any other transport, nor MQTT, and I even went back to using YAML over NodeRED for automation. So this is pretty important to me and my entire HA installation. I’m hoping now that I didn’t choose the wrong horse.
This fiasco of announcing the ‘release’ of an unfinished product, deprecating the only stable version of zwave available for a majority of users, while continuing to push OZW (beta) when it was basically deemed unworthy of continued effort - hence the one-month development of a replacement - only to suggest yet another community add-on to use as the UI to control all your devices under the “new” solution, um, since it’s not yet finished, has been an eye-opener.
You think that’s bad? I’m likely moving back to SmartThings for stability. I’m going to be giving the new Z-WaveJS a shot this weekend but if it doesn’t fix the fundamental issue I and several others are having with OZW, I literally have no choice.
Z-Wave and thus HA is completely unusable for several of us but that wasn’t the real kicker for me, I was the way we were treated for daring to bring up these issues, that’s actually soured the entire HA platform for me worse than the Z-Wave issues to be honest.
I enjoyed helping SmartThings devs were I could, I actively supported SmartThings devs with cold hard cash but the way things went down here, I have been serious put off the whole lot.
Your Post #104 nailed it. For me, without a reliable ZWave solution, HA isn’t an option. I researched the various transport methods prior to starting HA, before buying my first device. Everything I read led me to ZWave as the best solution for range, reliability, and privacy. ALL of my devices are ZWave, so this whole discussion has me pretty frustrated… and worried.
I was being serious in my last post, though. Other than only one or two devices (like my siren that uses the Sound Switch) all of my devices work flawlessly and consistently in the original zwave 1.4 integration. I periodically have to add XML data to the zwave config file from the alliance to get to the parameters when adding new devices, but once you’ve done it, it’s cake.
I can go weeks without a restart, and no issues, no errors. THAT’s why I remain on 1.4 and never tried OZW beta. And why would I want to incorporate MQTT into my system when I don’t need it now? All my battery devices are set to wake every 2 hours, so my entire network has checked in after a reboot in only a couple of hours max. It is fully operational, though, in only a couple of minutes from startup. You might give it another try before heading back to SmartThings.
