I’ve spent hours and hours screwing around with Z-wave over the last few years. It works well enough and if you don’t screw around like I do, it’s probably great. But one mix up and it’s all over. I’ve done this countless times. The moment I start to utter a word that starts with a Z my blood pressure boils. And since i must love pain, I’ve been running openzwave-qt for several weeks. It’s awesome. Until I tinker. In today’s episode of Keith’s F-Ups, I decided I needed to upgrade my openzwave-qt docker container. I barely know what I’m doing in docker which is entirely my fault. I had assumed that since I map the /opt/owz directory on the docker side with a directory in my home directory that things would be okay if I remove the container/image and download the new version. I do all this and now Z-wave is up but as far as I can tell all of the name changes I made in Open-Zwave are gone. I’m missing product names and all sorts of info. I realize it’s probably to late to recover anything and that all of this is my own fault, but can some kind soul let me know what I’m doing wrong? I’m looking at so much that I want to weep.
My system is running on Ubuntu 20. Otherwise fine. Virtual VENV. I’m good enough with Linux to do this for years (but not with docker apparently). My choices are limited if I don’t run venv, many of my HA scripts involve calling shell scripts and I prefer the power of venv. As far as I know I can download the vmware appliance (never got it to work), the Pi4 image (and use a USB Hub), or buy a NUC and try to load that image. Z-wave is destroying my soul.
I gave the VMware OVA another try - no issues this time, worked on the first try. New HA instance already running, this should be easier since I won’t need to setup the new openzwave myself. I’ll just need to work around my need for SH scripts - I’m sure I can figure something else out. Hopefully this will be the last time I recreate zwave
This will give you a super user friendly UI to help maintain your docker containers.
Want to upgrade to latest qt-ozwd? Easy, press ‘Recreate’ and turn on ‘Pull latest image’.
Easy as pie.
Once it’s running http://<IP or Hostname to your host>:9000
I hope things will get better in time.
Just my experience about portainer.
I feel I am kind of in the same boot as you are. I know too little about docker and linux in general to have a firm grip on things I do with zwave. But, I havent lost my cool yet… not yet…
Personally I have yet to discover the benefit of portainer. until now, I have only used portainer to check if settings are correct and are as how I have set them running the docker command…
What is the benefit in your opinion of using portainer? I dont find it so easy actually. What am I not seeing?
Thanks for your input firstof9 (are you the older brother of jerry ryan? ghehehe)
I particularly like the ability to “Recreate” the container with a single click. This allows me to update, ozwd for example, in a single click rather that multiple commands.
Update - I shut down the HA service after posting this topic and turned it on this morning. To my surprise the zwave network is still functional. The name field in the OpenZwave GUI is blank and I figured it had screwed everything up. It’s not. I’m running the latest version, so the upgrade worked. I’m not thrilled about the name field being dropped but I’m happy to report everything is working. I’ll need to think about what to do next. If I haven’t made it clear - the problems I’m having are my own, it has nothing to do with the openzwave project - I’m thrilled I don’t need to go back to Vera right away.
I am in a similar boat, I wanted to give OpenZwave a shot and I can best describe the experience so far as:
MQTT - no problem, had it for awhile, works great with Tasmota. Configuring the Zwave docker, not bad. Getting it talking to HA: frustrating nightmare.
My PIR sensors actually work great, and I thought they’d be the problem. What is the nightmare are my Appliance Modules, both and older Jasco 45603 and a newer Dragon Tech PA-100 I’m testing with. They show up great in HA, but simply DO NOT TOGGLE… or I should say, “toggled until they lost power/I moved them” and now they are no longer controllable which, pardon me, is just frustrating and stupid. No amount of restarting them, HA, docker containers, will return them functioning.
Oh, I can re-pair them and they’ll be fine I’m sure, until I have to reboot something or we get a power outage… repeat the whole thing ad nauseam.
I’d argue that it’s beyond Alpha, and it truly in beta. The problem is you and I rely on HA so much that we’re not as willing to test! BTW, I have a Hubitat hub, the new style with the newer zwave chip. It’s an improvement over Vera but I only have a few devices on it, so far I’m impressed
(are you the older brother of jerry ryan? ghehehe)