Ring Z-Wave Plus Door/Window Contact Sensor - does this work with HA?

Hardware
13

Just curious if anyone has an update on how to improve the process of adding these contact sensors with zwavejs? I bought one to test and I got it working. That was only after an hour or so of combinations with including/excluding, pressing the pin, and reinterviewing. I’m still not entirely sure of what actually helped with mine.

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14

I feel silly for buying a six pack of these Ring z-wave contact sensor G2 devices before checking this forum. I didn’t realize they would be difficult.

I’m using Z-Wave JS and the log seems to think the initial interview is successful, but the the light goes red at the end, as if it disagrees. I tried the trick mentioned above to poke the reset button after the red light, but according to the log, it just wakes the device up and it goes right back to sleep. I’ve even tried multiple HA instances with different brand Z-Wave USB sticks and I can’t seem to find the combination of things to make these work.

The device and all of its entities show up in HA, but their status never changes. It just always reports as “safe”. The intrusion switch continues to report “safe” as well, even with the battery cover removed.

:shrug:

15

Good to know.

I bought a house with a ring alarm system but it’s all Gen1 sensors. They work well with the Z-wave JS integration and addon.

Shame the gen2 don’t integrate well. These seem like the cheapest contact sensors for Seaver that I can regularly find.

Just need to hunt down a few more Gen1 sensors though to get everything alarmed.

16

Edit; I see now you are using just zwavejs I would suggest zwavejs2mqtt if you are still having issues but I would first try pairing how I mentioned even with just Zwave js until the interview completes… as soon as the Inteview actually finishes it should work

I have the gen2 working fine with zwavejs2mqtt… I’m going to search for my post but somewhere i mention what I did to pair… I believe leaving the cover off at first… pressing the button once then pressing and holding the reset pin hole until the light flashes… and if it doesn’t complete interview tap it again to wake up until interview complete.
I’ll link the post as soon as I find it but my gen2 have been working perfectly and are also now recognized as the correct device.

Edit: so I guess I didn’t go into too much more detail here but I believe a post higher up in the thread may have mentioned the process… but either way I assure you I have my entire 6 pack working perfectly

1 Like
17

For those coming back to this. I got a 6 pack of the sensor and have been having good luck with this process in zwavejs.

  1. Hold the led button for 5-10 seconds and start pair process from controller.
  2. Pair will happen in the controller (sometimes it shows nothing but just goes back to the start pair screen). Contact sensor will continue to flash until it shows red.
  3. Select the gen2 contact sensor in the zwave device list.
  4. Press the pin hole button for 5 seconds.
  5. Press the led button for 5-10 seconds. Then re-interview the device. Wait for re-interview to complete.
  6. Put back on the cover and move the magnet to and from sensor to see if it changes status. When I left the cover off it didn’t seem to update.

I’ve done 3 consistently with this process.

3 Likes
18

I verified @Roborobp’s steps Ring Z-Wave Plus Door/Window Contact Sensor - does this work with HA? - #17 by Roborobp works.
Before going through those steps I was able to connect my Ring Contact Sensor gen2 to HA, but didn’t see the sensor status changed when it should. Now I see “safety” state flips, which is not exactly what the sensor senses as some people have already reported above but I’m way happier than nothing.

Btw I might have to ask in a new thread. I’m new to HA community. If there’s a better location for documenting these best practices? I suggest we should add this, to give better ideas of which ones are good, verified solutions/workarounds. Otherwise I’m afraid people keep hacking, taking more time, prone to errors esp. due to missing lines in between.

In my case what I did was 1) Find this thread from google.com, 2) read through the top, 3) try 1 approach that I ran across first while I read through from the top (didn’t work completely), 4) This step is not really documented anywhere but in order to make every attempt self-contained, I did factory reset and did also whatever makes environment clean as possible. 5) read further and kept trying another approaches. Luckily I found the one that works.

19

Is this a binary sensor? In the states tab of the developer tools does it switch from on to off when activated?

If so, switch the device_class using customize to window/door as appropriate.

20

Interesting thread here all, especially as an HA noob making what switch from smartthings.

I currently have a Ring Alarm V2 with contact sensors placed around the house. They’re being used in routines via Alexa to control external hue lights on door open, etc. but the lag is terrible.

Is there a way of managing this in HA which will fire faster? I’m assuming the contact sensors can only pair with one zwave network so can’t coexist in HA and Ring.

21

I also figured it might be helpful to add some sample code to make the template entity work:

template: 
    - binary_sensor: 
    - name: "Ring_sensor_1"
      device_class: door
      state: > 
        {{ not(is_state("binary_sensor.ring_contact_sensor_1", "off")) }}

In this way, I have a new binary.sensor and it shows as a door, and it is closed when the magnet is near the sensor. This can just be added to your configuration.yaml file, then restart home assistant and you should have access to the new binary sensor entity. Make sure to put the name of the original binary sensor in the {{ not(is… part

22

I am considering purchasing a new Ring system - no video, just for the alarm monitoring. I see this thread about directly integrating the z-wave sensors, but is the HA ring integration able to expose the contact sensors, motion detectors and other Ring components natively? Arming and disarming via HA would also be a plus.

I’d love to get a solid answer on this before I shell out $$$ on a system. My fall back is a Honeywell panel with wireless sensors. I know that would be bombproof but the sensor and panel setup is just not fun at all as I’ve done it before. Having a slick iOS app to do the setup would be a plus. Just not sure if the tradeoff to have cloud versus local control is worth it. Plus I’m scared that Ring could pull the plug on the HA integration at some point.

Any suggestions/info on the above?

Thanks!

23

I was testing different Z wave sensors to use with the Alarmo panel to make a security sensor until yesterday. I ordered Fibaro, Aeotec, Aeon, Zooz, and Ring sensors. All worked great with Fibaro losing too much battery plus expensive (40$ a piece), Aeotec is pretty expensive but worked great. Zoon is cheap and good but it has only one 2032 battery so not sure how long it will last. I read some articles where people had luck with ring sensors so I purchased one for $20 from BestBuy and tried. Worked like charm. But binary sensor shows Safe and Unsafe so I configured it to be a window sensor in my case and restarted HASS. Now it showed up as Window with Open and Close. The biggest plus is the price of the Ring sensor. Gen 2 contact sensor 6 pack retails at 99 so about 16$ a piece and you can’t get any cheap sensor for that price and also comes with 2 CR2032 batteries. Ring says it will last about 3 years. I would be happy with a little over a year. I did not buy a Ring base, just the Ring sensors and Z wave stick(Aeotec gen 5+) on HASS OS on Raspberry PI 3B+. Works great, I wish I knew before I invested in all these sensors.

24

I was able to pair my sensor in ZWave JS using the steps above and it seems to be reporting safe/unsafe correctly. One question. When I look at the sensor on the ZWave JS dashboard, the security shows with a red circle with a dash for Security, is that expected? I was thinking these would connect with security as they are S2.

-Josh

25

I was also able to use the Ring G2 sensors. Grateful for the pairing tips above using the reset button. It’s probably obvious to most people here, but I will say it….to trigger an automation when the sensor is activated (door opened), you need to use the following under device trigger
“Patio Door Sensor: Home Security - Intrusion became unsafe”
Where Patio Door Sensor is the name I gave the device.

26

Youll need Samba Share activated to do this:
BACK UP FIRST
Navigate to \homeassistant\config.storage
You want to edit the core.entity_registry file
Search for the word “safety”
Change that device class to window or door. Depending on what you are using it for
Look for the string that contains the “Home Security - Intrusion”
it will look like this:
```{
“area_id”: null,
“capabilities”: null,
“config_entry_id”: “65135a145a10c203fc60af6b05da0ed1”,
“device_class”: “safety”,<-----Change this entry to “door” or "window"
“device_id”: “e327eba557771e251b8561b75b30dc16”,
“disabled_by”: null,
“entity_category”: null,
“entity_id”: “binary_sensor.YOUR SENSOR HERE”,
“icon”: null,
“id”: “6567a6981a389b65d1981d857670a656”,
“name”: “YOUR SENSOR NAME HERE”,
“options”: {},
“original_device_class”: “safety”,
“original_icon”: null,
“original_name”: “Contact Sensor Gen2: Home Security - Intrusion”,
“platform”: “zwave_js”,
“supported_features”: 0,
“unique_id”: “3444345620.64-113-0-Home Security-Sensor status.2”,
“unit_of_measurement”: null
},`
Save the restart after checking the config

2 Likes
27

Can anyone that has these (2nd gen) working reliably verify what security method they’re using?

I have about 4 of them and they paired using the S2 QR code, though it did take a few iterations of exclude/including them. But once they were fully added, they started acting more like tripwires - they’ll switch to insecure almost immediate and then won’t go back to secure (for at least some time). I’ve tried switching them to be door entities and have the same results. Next step was going to be trying with no security, but I didn’t have much luck getting one re-paired last night. Thanks

28

I tried adding one recently and didn’t have any luck adding it securely. Added it as non-secure and it works the way one would expect.

29

Interesting - I can add and remove them with the QR codewithout much fuss, but then they’re just laggy and unresponsive. I ran out of time to test insecure mode last night. For the record, I’m using a zooz 700 stick (and zwavejs).

Also of interest, I was looking into alternatives, and users of the Aeotec 700-series contact sensors are reporting the same issues I’m seeing when they securely pair them to Smartthings - major lag and/or never updating.

30

I have over a dozen of these working properly. This is how I get them to pair:

  • Factory reset by holding down button in small hole on back until it flashes red.
  • Start pairing in home assistant
  • Hold down main button for 5 seconds until it starts flashing faster
  • When pairing starts, it will hang up and flash red sometimes. Press reset button on back for a few seconds (don’t go past 9 seconds). Do this a couple times and it should pair properly
    Sometimes they wont operate. Do a re-interview. This usually fixes them.
    A couple posts up I go over how to get them to show as door/windows instead of safe/unsafe. Im not sure if the new UI options make that method obsolete though.
2 Likes
31

Rich, are you doing a secure or insecure pairing? And when you say sometimes they don’t operate, do you mean right after the pairing process, or do you mean that you have problems with them needing to be re-interviewed even after being installed for a while?

I take it from your second bullet point that you’re doing this from the HA interface - I’ve been working inside the zwavejs interface, so maybe that will make a difference.

I’m also wondering if there might be a few firmware versions out there like we encountered in the Ring Keypad thread because when I was following Roborobp’s instructions, step 5 got no reaction at all from the sensors. In fact, hitting the reset button after pairing pretty much leaves the sensors dead for me until doing a full reset. I do have another 6-pack that I haven’t opened yet, so I’ll try one of those and see if it behaves differently.

Thanks

32

I had the Gen 2 sensors setup flawlessly the first time, just with the reset on the back they went in to the triple blink then connected s2 auth, Just needed to put in that Pin# on the side and good to go.

Then I had to reset my Aeotec stick,{HA issue} and was unable to pair them no matter how many times I tried All my other Zwave items paired no issues. Rebuilt a New HA instance to try it to no avail.

****The way that worked with a little Hiccup was to take a picture of the Qr codes with my phone and crop them for HA and then used my phone to upload them in to the Queue for New items Via Z-Wave JS and then it would 90% of the time Create an unsecure Node and then while it’s still pairing i would press the Pin Button on the back and then it would then see “node 20 and being insecure then Zwave-JS would still be scanning and then it would re scan it and then make Node 21” after you would just remove the failed Nodes, and this has been after trying to many ways to get this to work .

But it looks like this has worked on All Nodes I put in tonight 6 Door Sensor re mounted and time for a Nap. lol
if you have HTTPS you can just scan them an not take a photo and upload them in. I wanted to make sure it worked before went back into HTTPS and bring it back online for remote access.