I meant to not give HomeSeer too much credit for their Z-wave handling. I mean it seems mostly fine, they have ota firmware flashing down pretty good, but the promised land of more than one controller on a single network just isn’t there. Your environment is just about identical to mine, right down to the exact 72 nodes (though I’ll have 2 more by the end of the week). I got the Zooz ZST10 S2 which I initially purchased for “experimenting” with Z-wave on HA. It’s working well enough that I just went with it. As a first responder, I’m not getting as much extra time at home as others, but nevertheless since we can’t really go out as a family during the apocalypse, I’ve used the little extra to completely rework my z-wave network - set all the parameters and so forth. It’s taken a few weekends, but overall everything is running much better now. If you have the opportunity and spare time right now, particularly given the size of your network, you may want to consider it. I eliminated the two remaining non-plus z-wave nodes I had and found a couple that I think just went bad.
HomeSeer is full of 80% finished implementations. HSTouch and now HSMobile are both examples of this, as is z-wave support. By carefully selecting my devices, I’ve been able to get it working reasonably well.
THANK YOU for what you are doing right now as a first responder. I don’t think any of us can say that enough.
I’m in exactly the same boat; been running HS3 for a couple of years and it has been rock solid. For me, the z-wave support has been great, easy to adopt devices and really no compatibility issues. I have a bunch of HS switches, and have seen issues about people getting these to function completely in HA. Seems perfectly reasonable to let HS be the Zwave hub for now.
So I’ve been following your thread, and while in a past life I was a software engineer myself, I’m not up to speed anymore on many things but can grind my way thru most issues. Totally new to HA. I’ve installed the HS3 component in HA and pulled in all my devices (and events etc, which I might get rid of now). Added a test light entity to the dashboard and can control it fine (and it shows state correctly if the switch is operated). They all show up as light/switch (etc) entities, but can’t seem to control them from automations/scripts since they aren’t devices. Where does the pyhs3 library play into this? Do you have any Homeseer WS/WD switches you’ve attempted to get scene controls working from?
They don’t need to be modeled as devices. The concept of “device” is a recent innovation. Your automations simply need to refer to your lights as entities. Looks in Developer Tools > States where you will find a list of all your entities and their current states. Then check out the Cookbook to learn how automations are written using entities.
To control an entity from an automation/script you call a service and pass it the entity id. For example, an automation would have an action of “Call Service” with the “Service” being “light.turn_on” or “light.turn_off” and the “entity id” of the light or light group. If this doesn’t make sense, read it a couple of times and ask again with what part you need help with.
The pyhs3 library is what actually communicates with HS3. Per the architecture of HA, a custom_component should not communicate directly with a physical device. The library creates an object called a “HomeTroller” that has a “listener” that watches the ASCII message interface and also a “request handler” that sends control commands back to HS via the JSON control interface.
I don’t have any WS/WD devices but I’m making changes (via github) now to support temperature, relative humidity, and luminance sensor readings. pyhs3 already supports z-wave central scene controllers so that may be enough or may just need a little tweaking. Currently pyhs3 only supports Z-Wave devices but could be expanded, if needed. For just about everything else I have, I found the HA implementation better so I just used that instead and turned it off in HS3.
What I’ve done is slowly move a few HS events to HA automations just to get a feel for how that all works. I now have all of my sunrise, sunset, and time specific HS events running as automations and the events disabled in HS.
Keep playing and ask lots of questions. I’ve started documenting a bunch of recipes for other HS users to follow.
Welcome to the HA family Ken. I was also a Homeseer user and like you, I started in the late 1990’s when Rick would call on a Sunday afternoon to tell you over the phone the code for your HS application and when the interface looked like MS Outlook. I jumped ship right after HS3 was released as I was very disappointed in their Linux implementation.
I’ve been dabbling with Home Assistant for over 2-1/2 years, started when it was version 0.31 and although it had some bumps and I’ve completely redone my system 3 times now, I like it a lot. I am not a strong programmer, but I do pretty well finding solutions on the forum. I am sure that this group will benefit greatly from you being part of this community. Welcome aboard!
Can HS3 publish to MQTT? I seem to recall there’s a plugin to do that (whether it’s free or not is another story).
Home Assistant has excellent support for MQTT. Just about every entity is modeled using MQTT. MQTT Integrations
FWIW, I’m a long time user of Premise and continue to use it along with Home Assistant. The two work together via MQTT. So-called ‘legacy devices’ that I have operating with Premise, for which Home Assistant has no integration (like HAI Omnistat), work seamlessly via MQTT.
The pyhs3 library that powers the homeseer custom component is open source. I’m done with plugins I can’t fix on my own. Too many abandoned/unsupported HS3 plugins and it’s only going to get worse with HS4. Yes, pyhs3 does rely on the ASCII and JSON interfaces but those are built into the core of HS3, which is unlikely to change.
EDIT:
I’ve created a pull request for pyhs3 to add the following to v0.10:
Z-Wave Temperature Sensor
Z-Wave Relative Humidity Sensor
Z-Wave Luminance Sensor
Z-Wave Fan State (for HVAC systems)
Z-Wave Operating State (For HVAC systems)
The first three are obvious. The last two are so I can track the run time of my HVAC air handlers and schedule routine maintenance and filter changes. I use the operating state to approximate energy usage.
Working on the corresponding changes for the homeseer component today.
I remember, maybe close to a year ago now, someone over at OpenHAB was making some progress with ser2net and Z-NET. I don’t recall if his work was in Java like most of the rest of that project. I used to think I’d love to have the ability to run a Z-NET at my in-laws so I could just manage everything over there from our place. They’re in the foothills of the mountains in Romania and I already have a site to site OpenVPN with them for hooking their IP cameras into my Blue Iris server. Now that I see the potential of the zwave2mqtt bridge, seems a better way to go.
I’ll definitely take a closer look at the zwave2mqtt bridge. @simplextech also pointed that out as a possible solution. With Michael (MCS) doing the MQTT plugin on the HS side, I’d feel safer with going that route than I would from some of the other plugin developers.
I’ll also check out the work that was done on OpenHAB. I’m not a Java guy but I work with a number of people who are.
I now integrate homeseer zwave devices with mqtt. Works solid. I’ll keep using that untill the new zwave HA implementation is out of alpha/beta. I can recommend the mqtt approach. Its quit fast (i use it with motion sensors and didnt notice it) and can help building the zwave homeseer events in home assistant
Thanks, that really helped to get some of the basics down. I have a zwave power meter on my dryer that I never got around to doing anything with in HS except logging some usage data, so it’s an opportunity start something new.
The HA component only pulls in physical lights/switches (no virtual devices, which I thought would be the easy way to do this), so that isn’t getting me very far. I did come across this guy https://github.com/paulmona/MyHomeAssistantConfig who’s also running HS for z-wave, HA for a front end and using MQTT to connect it all. Haven’t gotten too far into it yet and I’ve never used MQTT for anything, but going to start down that rabbit hole and see where it goes.
@phaeton - Just installed mcsMQTT on the HS side for testing. I’m assuming you are using Mosquitto broker on the HA side? Is that right?
@wabbastang - What HD component are you referring to? Can you explain more of what you mean by virtual devices? Do you mean on the HS side of the equation? If that’s what you mean I’d suggest you re-think how those are used and move the functionality over to HA instead. I understand the going down the rabbit hole in that I now have over 30 automations that would have to be re-done if I change to MQTT. But, then again, with stay-at-home, what else do I have to do?
Sorry, “HD” was a [very confusing] typo - “HA” component, the marthoc/homeseer one. I am not using the pyhs3 script for anything. You mentioned earlier a HA component shouldn’t communicate directly with a physical device (but it’s not right, it’s talking to HS), but by using nothing but the marthoc component I have no trouble controlling and monitoring real time all of my HS switches and lights, and can call any HS event. I am probably missing something here, but at this moment it’s working great.
Moving on to the Homeseer devices that the HA component isn’t bringing in (sensors etc) - Using dryer watts to test. Also set up a virtual on/off switch that HS events set as a test subject.
Installed mcsMQTT last night on Homeseer and the Mosquitto broker in HA. Followed a quick youtube on setting up some publishing in mcsMQTT (was a little overwhelming at first glance). Setup HA sensors on the /homeseer/sensor/dryer_watts and /dryer_status topics.
Initially, got mcs to connect to the broker no problem but it would not receive any topics. Learned there was/is a bug in the mcsMQTT addon that wasn’t properly showing the published topics even though it was working fine, but fought that anyway for a couple hours; he pointed me to a different package which it was fixed in and took that off the table. At that point knew it had to be on the HA side; did a marathon session of removing/reinstalling the HA integration and component in various orders, and suddenly it started working even though configuration ended up where I started. The only Mosquitto config modification I did was enabling anonymous; did not create any ACLs even tho the instructions say it’s required for unrestricted topic access, even anonymously. My dryer watts/status are being pushed from HS via MQTT and the HA sensors are working, success.
So next, I think, now that I can access all my HS devices and sensors, is going to be starting to remove HS events and set up new ones in HA. Installed NodeRED and going to start down THAT…
Welcome !
I also ditched HomeSeer after seeing HS4 (been a HS user for 7+ years, I even sell plugins).
So I’m a HA user for 8 months or so now. I completely moved everything over (zwave, zigbee, …), never looked back since.
From time to time I install the latest HS beta to see how many bugs I can find in half an hour. The overall quality and look and feel is mediocre at best. There are just too many issues in the software that went unnoticed by them and are still unresolved 2 weeks before the official release. Their GitHub also has 30+ open issues.
They completely blew it with their ‘mobile centric’ approach with half-ass features. Now the thing isn’t usable on mobile and on desktop.
I tried a few different platforms briefly before going full speed on Homeseer, and while you do have to pay for it, it’s been really stable, relatively powerful and easy to use. The zwave support has been good for me and I really have no major complaints about it, but it just feels archaic compared to what else is out there. As you know there’s a lot of broken/out of date/unsupported addons, which is irritating when you’re paying for it. HS Touch is a mess (and I invested a good amount of time to actually learn it). I had high hopes when HS Mobile was announced, but as usual it’s moved at an absolute snail’s pace with little to no change since it was introduced. After trying the HS4 beta, I’m even more confused about where there are intending to go with HS (if anywhere). Anyway, frustrating, just looking for more and willing to spend a little time at this point.
What are you using for hardware to run your zwave/zigbee? I currently have a HS smart stick and with HS3’s solid zwave support, leaving it in place for now, but that’s far from ideal. Are you using Node-red for automations?
Yup and my telling Rich over and over and over didn’t do anything but get me kicked out of “the club”… I notice my posts are now getting censored and deleted on the forum too… hmm…