My Question:
I’ve been trying to get my Plugwise Stick + Plugs to work previously, see my previous post here. As I did not get any update message (not even sure this is possible these days, it definitely was in the past, I would receive an email telling there was a reply to my post (correct me if I’m wrong))
Hence I did not notice the reply of @bouwew and various other fellow members. Apologies for this.
So how did I proceed?
I very recently set up an old Dell with Proxmox, and installed HA on top of Proxmox. That is all up and running, no issues there.
Did quite some searching and reading and found there seems to be quite some newish information / development around the Plugwise products.
so I went about and installed HACS
installed Plugwise USB/Stick beta
I have passed through the Plugwise usb stick to HA in Proxmox
(I noticed there’s two ways to do this, either passthrough a usb port or passthrough the FT232R USB UART. At first I did only passthrough the usb port, but changed that later on to passthrough the Plugwise stick instead)
But I am at a loss to how to proceed further.
lsusb shows me a couple of devices, but I am unable to distinguish which one is the stick?
also it seems plugwise-python-usb should be installed, but I’m not sure how to do that, when I try to add the github repo, entering the full path I get some error stating <integration plugwise/python-plugwise-usb> Repository structure for v0.31.1 is not compliant.
What am I missing here?
how do I use the /config/custom_components/plugwise_usb files?
Update 1:
Proof of concept is working! A big Thank You to the community and the developers that make this work!
I am totally unable to tell why or how, but after an indefinite period:
1 Circle+ appeared in my HA!!
Now, what I don’t remember nor know:
I collected my Plugwise plugs over time.
First bought a set, then an extension (that was with my first usb-stick).
Many years later I bought two extra sets from ebay.
I remember there was a distinction between Circle+ and Circle.
Circle+ have grey coloured bottom.
Circle have white bottom.
As it seems I am only seeing a single Circle+, I am unsure how the other Circles will appear or whether I have to configure them myself?
The Circle+ is the master of the system, it communicates with the Stick.
Other Circles need to be connected/paired with the Circle+. When a Circle doesn’t belong to a network it should automatically connect to the Circle+.
If this doesn’t happen, the Circle needs to be reset.
See here: Reset plugwise - Home Automation Domotica Forum Europe, Bwired Forum
Thanks a ton for replying!
In the mean time Home Assistant seems to have recognised 4 Plugs, but there are many more.
I’ll take a look at the info you linked to, thanks for that.
If I’m not mistaken, originally the Circles where linked to a single Circle+ and to their own usb-stick.
Do you know if, using HA, a single stick would suffice to connect to all the Circle’s and Circle+'s?
I guess the Circle+ are Zigbee routers?
Ok, thanks a lot for replying!
Not entirely clear though…
Let me explain:
I have:
1 stick with 1 circle+ and 8 circle plugs
1 extension kit of 10 plugs
These I bought from Plugwise in the Netherlands directly long time ago.
1 stick with 1 circle+ and 8 circle plugs
another 1 stick with 1 circle+ and 8 circle plugs
This makes for a total of 37 plugs and 3 (usb)sticks.
I have installed HACS and Plugwise USB/Stick beta.
With a lot of trial and error I got the first stick with a couple of plugs connected and visible in HA.
After about a week I have now 17 devices connected, which is about what my first set of 9 + extension set accounts for.
But still a lot of plugs were missing / not connected or not visible in HA. Not being sure out of my head which plug belongs to which stick, I also connected the other two usb-sticks, so a total of three usb sticks connected.
Now I do seem to understand that one also needs to configure the specific /dev/ttyUSB0 and or /dev/ttyUSB1 and or /dev/ttyUSB2 to be connected or used by Plugwise USB Beta?
So I set out to “ADD HUB” which then shows me the 3 available sticks. As I do not clearly know which is which, I tried adding them.
At one moment I got a message !Success!!, but then a bit later it shows: Stick - Failed setup, will retry.
Any advice welcome on how to connect the other two sticks!
(I have debugging enabled at the moment, but don’t know yet how / where I can read the debug information)
I think I can reply to this issue myself:
Doing a tail -f with debugging enabled, I noticed there was this message:
19:04.169 WARNING (MainThread) [custom_components.plugwise_usb] Failed to connect to Circle+ node
2024-01-06 19:20:29.918 ERROR (serial_reader_thread) [plugwise_usb] Circle+ is not discovered yet
2024-01-06 19:20:39.948 WARNING (MainThread) [custom_components.plugwise_usb] Failed to connect to Circle+ node
2024-01-06 19:22:05.801 ERROR (serial_reader_thread)[plugwise_usb] Circle+ is not discovered yet
2024-01-06 19:22:15.822 WARNING (MainThread) [custom_components.plugwise_usb] Failed to connect to Circle+ node
The next thing I did was to put the two other Circle+ plugs closer to the usb sticks and after a short while at least 3 devices from the second stick have appeared.
Any pointer as to how to more easily verify the stick ID in conjunction with the connected /dev/ttyUSBn device?
Again thanks a ton to those who made this all possible!
I have no experience yet with scripting or automations.
Would be looking for a pointer on how to automate the typical pairing sequence of
2 secs on
2 secs off
repeat this 3x
I imagine this can’t be too hard, but have no clue where to start. I could use one of the plugs to do the switching. Could also be used to pair Ikea Tradfri items.
Do you have any pointer to a helping tutorial to do this?
Hi Bouwe,
Sorry if this is a bit of a stupid question but I have been struggling with these plugwise devices for a while now. I have a Stretch (V2.2.15), a circle+, and many circle units. The Stretch is not connecting to any of the circle units except 2 and not even the circle+ for some reason. I opened the stretch unit and found that it has a zigbee usb drive inside that shows as a serial FTDI device in linux. The plugwise USB lib in HACS is struggling to connect to the USB stick. I just says “Failed setup will retry”. I still need to change it to not use ttyUSB0 but I am now at a bit of a dilemma. Do I continue to struggle with the unmarked zigbee USB stick (the chip on it is a zigbee intergace) or do I put it back into the stretch and try the official integration and struggle with the connection problem? What has been your experience with this and HA? Buying an official USB plugwise stick is also an option.
Be aware moving the USB-stick to anther USB-port (or device), especially at a different physical location, kind of triggers a network rebuild.
From my experience it could take up to a few hours to have the mesh network settle down and fully work again.
The native USB-stick integration is currently unable to handle big (devices which have more physically distance between them) networks due to the current architectural design of the backend python library.
I am new to Home Assistant as a platform.
I just want to move over my installation of Source from Windows to Home Assistant.
The set consists of a Stick, Circle+ and 35 Circle plugs.
I did a new install of Home Assistant on a Pi 4 and this runs fine.
I added HACS and the Plugwise USB/Stick custom_component (BETA), but it is not functioning as expected. When I click the tile of Plugwise USB/Stick custom_component (BETA) it shows me the Github page and not the Plugwise configuration page as I see in a post from user ipanini in a post from 3 weeks ago.
During installation there was no question asked “Select or enter the USB-path” as referred the readme.
I am puzzled, what am I missing or is not started correctly?
Answer to my own post above; I’ ve got it working after a weekend of reading and exploring Home Assistant
Happy to get all the Circles reporting readings, now on to learning more about the possibilities of Home Assistant.
I bought some old Plugwise stuff second hand, quite cheap. I’m now trying to get it to work with HA, using the plugwise_usb-beta. I’ve installed that one via HACS. Plugged in the Stick and selected it. I’ve also plugged in a Circle+ in an outlet near my HA machine where the USB stick is plugged in.
However, the integration doesn’t come in a healthy state. In the log, I keep seeing these lines, repeated every 2 minutes or so:
2024-03-28 20:06:15.508 ERROR (serial_reader_thread) [plugwise_usb] Circle+ is not discovered yet
2024-03-28 20:06:25.504 WARNING (MainThread) [custom_components.plugwise_usb] Failed to connect to Circle+ node
So the Stick can’t connect to the Circle+. Is there anything I can do to help that? Should I give it time? Note that I bought the Stick and the Circle+ from different people, so the Circle+ was probably previously connected to a different Stick.
Yes, you will need to pair the Circle+ with the Stick.
You might need to use the Plugwise Source software for that. @brefa maybe you know a bit more about this?
The error message indicates the stick is unable to communicate with the paired Circle+ plug.
During startup the communication to the Circle+ is required to retrieve the information required to discover any of the other registered Plugwise devices.
