Ok, working on switching from the Wink to the Aeon Z-stick for my z-wave sensors. I’ve done the install process for the Z-stick. I see the Zwave card on the HASS overview, and the Z-stick is recoginized. I removed the Z-stick and went around to enroll my sensors, and that seemed to work. I now see the sensors on the zwave card as “sleeping (probe)”.
The issue is that the state of the sensors doesn’t change when the sensors are opened. Is there an additional step I’m missing?
Thanks!
I took the extra step of starting the “add node” function in the HASS zwave config module, then going around to the three sensors and triggering their add buttons. This didn’t seem to do much for two of them, but one has switched from “Sleeping (Probe)” to “Sleeping (CacheLoad)”, and now there is a binary sensor associated with that switch. All three switches are identical, so I’m not sure how to get it to know there is a binary sensor option inside the other two switches.
Hi J,
The Z-stick is quite finicky in my experience. I never really got the add button on the device to work properly, and add all my devices from the dashboard.
With the latest version of home assistant this seems to work relatively well (somewhere between 0.40 and 0.50 it got a lot better, before that I had to use the separate OZW control panel). But you need to be very patient. A node may take several minutes to integrate at the beginning the first time, and if you change the z-wave configuration this may even take a few hours before it is correctly written to the device.
Often I had problems when I was expecting the device to configure too quickly and tried to remove and add it again and it made everything a lot worse. I think the z-wave network starts to get clogged with commands and everything stops working. I suggest having a lot of patience when adding devices, and if nothing updates after 10 minutes, try a soft reset or heal network, but don’t enter more than one command at a time. Again, patience is key.
Sleeping (Probe) means that the Z-Wave stack has talked to the sensor this session but it’s not currently responding to commands - expected for a battery powered security sensor.
Sleeping (CacheLoad) means that the Z-Wave stack / controller saved the fact that this sensor exists, but hasn’t heard from it this session.
The HA docs now say explicitly not to use the add button on the Z-Stick to add stuff. One problem it can cause is that you have no idea whether your sensors are in range of the stick when it’s plugged into the Pi vs when you are carrying it around. Considering that the sensor state doesn’t update back at the hub when you open them, range seems to be the most likely culprit (though not the only one). Z-Wave range is nothing special and is pretty poor through walls and the like. Having a good mesh of wired devices (light switches etc) helps a lot.
I thought the Aeotec ZW090 gen 5 was zwave plus. Why is it when I click on the Zwave card on HASS for the stick to pull up it’s info, it’s showing “is zwave plus = false”?
Yup, that’s perfectly normal. You’ll find a few threads about it - it’s just a bug in the way OpenZWave reports it.
it’s just a bug in the way
really??? I’m having trouble with the only zwave device in my network, which gets very frequently marked as Dead and thought this had to do with it. Can you share the link to the bug?
Thanks
There’s no formal bug report, it’s purely an observation that nobody has a Z-Wave plus stick or hat that’s marked as Z-Wave Plus.