OK so all done. The middle switch box was a pain. That thing is loaded with wires and actually has wires coming into it and back out (looping in from one conduit and out another) and could never figure out what it was. Turned off everything in the circuit box except some of my kitchen bigger appliances so who knows. Didn’t worry about it since it was just wire in and out, no connections. To make this work I had to add extra wires for the neutral pigtail as well as for power. Problem? Well there are already four neutral wires in this box and four power wires in this box and only have 5 and 3 port WAGO lever nuts. So had to put four wires of each in a 5 port Wego, then pigtail to a 3 port one and then two wires out from there to the two switches in that box. Did this twice for the hot and neutral wires. Then getting the switches back in was a bit of a challenge but did go in with very little resistance.
First time i tried turning it on it worked and then stopped. Took that box apart and one of the neutrals came loose. Adjusted it a bit and put them back Now it’s working again and with Alexa.
Only thing I still see is one time when I turned on the power from the circuit fresh only the main works and the two other switches show the led indicator like they are off and the bottom light on the brightness indicator are on. Turned the power off and on and it started again. Then one of my family was trying it and it stopped responding. You could turn it off and on visually on the switch but the lights didn’t respond. Powered it again and back to normal. Now seems to be working so not sure if/what to make of that.
I am also about a year in on the zwave2mqtt boat and this works pretty well. Sure there are dead nodes and nodes that stop identifying what they are but a power cycle of the node or reboot generally resolve issues.
I would be interested in a walk trough of making this work with openzwave 1.6. I tried a few months back but that was not a good idea at the time.
Yeah I followed what seemed like a decent guide and when I thought I was on 1.6 the good people here showed me it was not using it. I was going to post for your reference but apparently deleted it from my 70 page Word doc on what I’ve done so far when people showed it wasn’t working. Can find the article again if you like but apparently didn’t work.
@jriker1, @DamianFlynn
I did my setup using Ubuntu 16.04 (on an old 32bit machine) as well as 18.0.4 on a 64bit machine. So using Ubuntu via shell access, what I did in general was:
Git download openzwave. I downloaded the latest one from the Master branch (which will be version 1.6+), but you can pick version 1.6 explicitly from the tag.
Do a make which will build openzwave shared libraries, and then do a make install which will place the shared libraries in a variety of places (namely /usr/local/xxxx) so that ZWave2MQTT can get to it. You also may have to create symbolic links to get 64bit library to point to the 32bit library. For Ubuntu, you also may have to use sudo ldconfig which helps applications like ZWave2MQTT find these libraries. Next you can run MinOZW (give it the location of the ZWave stick), to verify OpenZwave works properly.
Create a NodeJS environment. Ubuntu’s nodeJS is rather old, and has other issues, so I built a whole new NodeJS environment. ZWave2MQTT is NodeJS based, so you need this environment if you want to build ZWave2MQTT on your local system. I used Node Version Manager (NVM) which is a bash script to do all the heavy work. You can read about NVM here: https://github.com/nvm-sh/nvm. I used the curl command to download and install NVM. Log out and back in to pick up the bash changes and you should have nvm working. Next and easiest would be to run nvm --lts which will download several versions of NodeJS and build them, which may take a while. I found that running version 12 didn’t build ZWave2MQTT, but version 10 did. If you change the version you use, you have to tell nvm to use that version by default.
Git download zwave2mqtt. I didn’t download from the master branch, I picked the latest tagged version. Cd into the zwave2mqtt directory and run npm install and then npm run build and it should build. You may run into the npm version problem I mentioned earlier so change the npm version (say to version 10.x.x) if needed. If successful, then simply do npm start and point your web browser to it to see if its working. You should see in the ZWave2MQTT log file which version of OpenZwave you’re using and it should show some variant of version 1.6.
There are probably a few details I missed out on, but thought I would start with this to see if it helps.
On reading this it appears that you did not need to do any tweaking to get the node app working - but respect that your using the latest tagged release.
I’ll give this a spin during the week and loop back. I might try build it in a container