What’s the story with the ‘new’ Z-Wave IDs that ‘Just had to be changed’? I’ve been running HA for quite a while, and i’ts been working great overall, aside from the occasional speedbump. So I started working towards settign up two new HA instances on RPi’s using the newer version of the RaZberry interface that I’ve been using,
After installing the fresh Hasbian and doing some brief testing on the new install, I decided, what the heck, let’s start changing my Z-Wave IDs over (which I have been avoiding/resisting since that was first announced). Well, apparently, my intuition was spot on and I was avoiding it for a good reason.
So I started by renaming a node that didn’t have any real automation. So I rename my office lights form what the were to ‘Office Lights’. I’ve found that a reboot is required for it to take effect, so I reboot. It comes back up and my Office lights are now ‘light.office_lights_55’ (I think - the main part is after the rename, they were were something to the effect of ‘light.office_lights’. Everything still works, so I think ‘cool’. I rename all of my basement switches. Two fans and several lights. Rename them and reboot, and they now all show up simialrly. The Fans show up as ‘fan.office_fan’ (or similar). Everything still seems to work, so I go to modigy my groups to reflect the new names, and I then reboot… On reboot, my ‘Basement’ group disappears. What the heck? So I go look, and now, for reasons unknown, my new IDs that were ‘light.office_lights’ and ‘fan.office_fan’ are NOW ‘zwave.office_lights’ and ‘zwave.office_fan’ and similar for the others.
Frankly, I have no idea what it’s doing and I’m getting a bit ticked off. Take my office fan. If I go to the ‘ZWave’ card and select my office fan, I get ‘new entity id zwave.office_fan’ and ‘old entity id zwave.office_fan_54’. If I then go to my groups.yaml and set the entity in my ‘basement’ group for the fan to ‘zwave.office_fan’, nothing. The group is MIA because at this point, all of the entities are… something… If I change the fan to ‘zwave.office_fan_54’, which is under ‘old entity id’, lo and behold, the ‘Basement’ group returns and I can see my fan… but… it’s just ‘status’… it can’t be manipulated… The same holds true for lights. This is INFURIATING. The ONLY way I have been able to get the group to return is by adding the devices as ‘zwave.theater_front_lights_36’, for example. But that is just status. Can’t be manipulated. So I have to ask again… WHAT THE HECK? The way it was before the ‘new IDs’ may not have been super intuitive, but it WORKED… This… DOESN’T. The ‘less than intuitive’ IDs from before is more or less what the ‘customize.yaml’ was for - take these rather unintuituve IDs and display them as something you can understand in the WebUI.
I’m not sure what people were thinking, but based on what I’ve seen trying to migrate a few devices to the ‘new’ IDs, it’s a horrible ‘cluster’. I don’t know what’s going on, but after the initial rename, things seemed ok, but for whatever random reason, at some point, the names decided to randomly rename again, and it’s been totally borked from there.
So how is one supposed to make this change? If one looks a the ‘old entity id’ after the rename, you get nothing. If you look at the ‘new entity id’, you get the group entity back, but it’s just the ‘zwave status’ entity. You can’t do anything with it. And that’s after the initial rename, where everything seems well and good, but then for whatever reason, after all appears good, the IDs rename AGAIN… And when is the flying monkey going to fly out of the closet randomly changing IDs again without warning, and borking things again? Again, my renames seemed to work just fine until something decided to re-rename them again after the fact.
So can anyone suggest a way to return things to normal, or should I deep six this endeavor and try to some how revert to how it was before trying to ‘conform’ and not update any further? The way it was worked well. May not have been super intuitive, but it worked… This… Not so much from what I can tell.
So is there some ‘special sauce’ to get this back on track or is it terminal?
Edit: this is my ‘Basement’ Group as it is right now:
Basement:
- zwave.theater_front_lights_36
- zwave.theater_rear_lights_37
- fan.theater_fan_41
- zwave.basement_stairs
- zwave.office_fan
- zwave.office_lightsThe only ones that show up int he WebUI are the front and rear theater lights - and they’re just ‘status’. Can’t be manipulated. Everything else… NOPE.