Homeseer WD200s are flaky with ZwaveJS and Nortek dongle

Hi all. I’ve got a handful of Homeseer WD200’s in my house, and they’ve worked reliably with my SmartThings hub, but I’ve been transitioning to HA with ZwaveJS (and I’ve got just about everything else in my house moved over, already) but I still need the ST hub to control my WD200s. The two WD200s I’ve tried including to HA have both exhibited the same set of symptoms:

  • Flaky pairing (it will take me about 3-4 tries to get it included)
  • Inconsistent responses to re-interview (ZwaveJS “interviews” devices to ask them what protocols and command classes they support, instead of relying on the model ID being in a database). Randomly, ZwaveJS will report that a certain command isn’t supported on the device, so I re-interview the device and get a different set of command classes supported.
  • Randomly becoming unavailable/dead. Once I get one included, it will respond for less than a day, and then it stops responding and I have to factory-reset it and start over at the top of this list.

Is this a known behavior with ZwaveJS and some devices?
In desperation, I was thinking of trying to update the firmware on them? ZWaveJS has support for downloading firmware files from manufacturer websites and sending them to the devices, but the set of supported devices is rather small. I could add support for the WD200 to my local ZwaveJS install, but the firmware files for it end in “.hec” while all of the other examples I’ve seen in ZwaveJS end in either “.hex” or “.otz”. Anybody want to venture a guess on what format “.hec” is? (Or is that just for the device to figure out?)

What ZWave stick are you using? I believe the HomeSeer 200 series of devices support Z-Wave Plus S2, which needs a 500 or 700 series ZWave stick. I use a Zooz S2 Stick (ZST10 700) and it works perfectly with my HomeSeer FC200+ switch.

Is your ZWave stick plugged directly into the computer? Or plugged into a USB 3 port (blue color)? If so, try moving it to a USB 2 port, and try moving it away from the computer with a USB extension cable.