Open Z-wave Beginner Questions

After configuring my Z-Wave integration and not fully understanding it, I decided to move to OpenZ-Wave sooner rather than later. Even though I didn’t comprehend all of the nuance, it seemed to be a step towards future proofing. I’m guessing my issues & confusion stem from having first started with the generic Z-wave add-on.

I understand OZW is in Beta and thus will have its flaws until momentum builds to a general release, but I’m still stumped on exactly what to expect and how to piece all of the components together in HA.

Main questions:

  1. Exactly which features overlap between OZW & regular Z-Wave addon? I have both found in my Integration (screenshot). I seem to have ozw. services and zwave. but far more services on the latter.
  2. Where (how) would I configure automations to update parameter’s of my z-wave devices?
  3. Is the Web GUI currently available in the OpenZwave Beta expected to modernize into the HA interface?
  4. Where can I learn about the OZW beta project and follow releases/features specific to OZW on HA (not the generic Z-Wave addon)?
  5. Going forward, how might I discern whether something I’m reading/viewing describing HA + Z-Wave is actually relevant to my using OZW Beta 1.6? This includes all the supported and community add-ons: i.e. Z-Wave to MQTT, Z-Wave Network Viewer, and more.

Hardware:

  • Nortek HUSBZB-1 Stick (says Z-Wave Plus on the stick, but not recognized as such)
  • Inovelli LZW-30 Switch
  • Schlage Connect BE469ZP Smart Deadbolt
  • HASSIO v0.116.4 on RPi 3B+

Behaviors that don’t make sense to me:

When I try to test the ozw.set_config_parameter service for the Inovelli switch:

node_id: 3
parameter: 8
value: 39455452
instance: 1

I get the error Failed to call service ozw/set_config_parameter. ‘NoneType’ object has no attribute ‘type’ that doesn’t add up, since I’m sending the data as expected by the example data with a value from the Inovelli Toolbox.

Next, I run MQTT alongside OZW Beta, but yet I can’t decipher the origin of errors, when the OZW Network fails to eventually connect, perpetually showing Network Starting: Connecting to MQTT. Am I too inpatient, even after waiting for 30m?

There seems to be a lot of promise with OZW, but I’m still struggling to navigate the ecosystem and reliably achieve basic network management. How do I get back to basics, i.e. remove or reinstall Z-wave traditional add-on and remove certain configuration entriees or XML files? Plz help.

This is quite a bit to unpack, but I will give it a go.

  1. It’s been a while since I’ve used the original Z-Wave integration, but I believe the OZW beta integration can do everything the original could.
  2. Where would be under automatons in the main configuration settings. How would probably just be a service call to the ozw.set_config_parameter you found.
  3. There are definitely updates planned for the interface.
  4. One way would be to join the Home Assistant discord server and look in the channel “zwave”.
  5. As far as I know the community addons are all for the original Z-Wave integration.

In regards to the unexpected behavior:
The OZW beta integration communicates to Home Assistant via MQTT. You will need to have the MQTT broker running (and the integration added) in addition to the OZW integration. When you issue a command from Home Assistant the OZW integration will translate that into an MQTT topic which then traverses the network to the ozwdaemon which interprets it and communicates through the attached Z-Wave controller to the device. I would recommend removing the original Z-Wave integration to avoid some confusion.

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You can’t have both integrations running at the same time.
Only one integration can be using the usb stick at a time.
Also you need to install the mosquitto broker from addons for it to work.
I tried with an external broker and it would never connect to MQTT.

Some of the parameters seem to work with ozw.set_config_parameter for the Inovelli switch, while others don’t.

One thing that remains unclear to me is what the Node Management screen is supposed to provide. For me it only gives one available command for Refresh Node. The rest of the panels are all empty, but no errors seem to log based on this:

In the OZW Beta integration, you can set Innovelli parameters via the OZW admin tool (either embedded in the add-on or via external client).

See attached as an example viewimage