Home Assistant Community Add-on: Z-Wave to MQTT

Installation Home Assistant OS
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21

Do you not use secure devices then? Or does it auto gen a key?

22

No secure devices indeed.
Nobody in the neighborhood with zwave anyway.

23

Two questions:

  1. Howā€™s the responsiveness with this approach? I already find zwave devices somewhat laggy, especially in terms of feedback, compared to WiFi and Caseta devices, and am concerned that adding MQTT into the loop will additional lag. What are folksā€™ experiences with this aspect?

  2. My install has Hass.io running on Ubuntu/docker with a USB Z-stick (the Ubuntu itself is running as a VM on ESXI). When I set it up, I didnā€™t do anything particular to make the Hass.io container see the USB device (I had to pass it to the VM at the hypervisor level, but nothing in Ubuntu/Docker). What, if anything, would I need to do to transfer control over that device to this add-on?

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24

Not using this myself so I canā€™t give you an actual answer, but in the GUI thereā€™s a setting for Poll interval where you can define the mS between polls to Z-Wave devices that donā€™t automatically report back their status. If you only have a small number of devices you can probably crank this up to be very quick, but if you have a lot of devices and set it too fast itā€™s gonna have the opposite effect and start choking the network and causing a lot of lag.
Iā€™m pretty sure the native OZW implementation in HA has the same setting, just not presented right at the GUI like this addon does.

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25

I managed to see the directory, but where is this key?

26

sorry, i cannot remember which file i found it in. Just run the following when in that directory:
grep -ir 'network' *

27

thanks. Is null for me

core.config_entries: ā€œnetwork_keyā€: null,

28

do you have any secure devices? if not, then the key doesnā€™t matter (as I understand it)

29

The addon populated the node after a (long) wait.

Unfortunately both cannot coexist: the internal component is not working when this addon is active

30

If I want to change from the built in zwave controller to this, do I have to stop the built in one first?

31

Yes. You need to remove it either in your configuration.yaml or in your integrations.

32

Anyone has a working setup?
Iā€™ve got the Zwave part working and sending messages but no discovery in HA.
Can anyone please share how thatā€™s done? Not a lot of experience with MQTT Iā€™m afraid.

33

Okay but when I do that, would the add-on just pick up my devices or do they need to be re-configured?

34

Most likely they need to be reconfigured.
This is where Iā€™m strong as well. You need to use the mqtt component to get the values back in.
Iā€™ve asked the question 2 posts back.

35

I donā€™t have anything using MQTT so i have no experience with that, but I have had my Zwave get messed up from to many restarts.

36

I have spent the best part of a day trying to get this setup but after lots of debugging I figured the way Zwave2Mqtt composes messages and topics are not compatible with HA MQTT discovery. HA expects to get /ā€¦ type of topics but none of the three methods for gateway setup in Zwave2Mqtt publishes it this way.

37

I see, did you start using it?
If so, how did you get the devices into HA and what method for gateway did you choose?
Appreciate the help.

38

It would be nice it we can get some kind of conversion write up from HA Zwave to this (if I get time and successfully get it working I would). It seems like all my Zwave issues pop up after HA restarts.

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39

After seeing this Add-On I got the OpenZWave2mqtt working on itā€™s own (as I donā€™t use HASS.io, but just manage the docker container myself). Looks like there is no Discovery support in OpenZWave2mqtt, which makes it less viable to use than the built in ZWave functionality of Home Assistant.

40

I agree. It seems to be on the todo list though. Maybe we can contribute to get it working :slight_smile: