Yeah unfortunately I may never know if it’s VMware. With an entire server farm in my basement not really feeling the raspberry pi route is a path I want to take. I’d hate to do this because this is infrastructure but would this be a safe thing to install from an HA perspective and should work?
Leviton DZ15S-1BZ Decora Smart Switch with Z-Wave Technology
And if this acts up then apparently it’s VMware and I just can’t use Z-Wave with it? Unless someone knows of someone that set this up and how they did it with the same setup?
So i am downloading the latest patches for VMware workstation but I did the below, rebooted and it came back again. Was it that change or the reboot who knows:
thout the NetworkManager, you will be not able to control your host network setup over the UI. The modemmanager package will interfere with any Z-Wave or Zigbee stick and should be removed or disabled. Failure to do so will result in random failures of those integrations. For example you can disable with sudo systemctl disable ModemManager and remove with `sudo apt-get purge modemmanager
My advice would be to test this with ozwcp docker image. You can then isolate the zwave portion from the HA portion and at least determine what’s going on at the zwave level.
If at the ozwcp level the flood alarm types seem to work correctly you can then investigate the HA integration etc.
Alarm Type and Alarm Level are from like version 1 of the zwave specifications. They are completely vendor defined and may act in weird ways. The Burgler/Flood etc entities are what you should look at - they are part of the specifications.
OZW 1.4 supported upto version 5 or 6 of the Alarm (now called Notification CC). in OZW 1.6 we completely rewrote that and it now supports version 11 but just requires a xml file update to support new versions.
As for the entities not returning to 0 after you clear the flood - some devices (and it looks like yours) report events. A event is “something happened”. It’s not a state “something is happening”. Hence, you have to treat it like a edge trigger rather than a level trigger.
In OZW 1.6 we work around “edge” triggered devices by automatically returning the entity to 0 after a timeout (1 second from memory - configurable).
If in OZWCP you observe a pattern that looks reasonable, you may want to try using zwave2mqtt dev releases as they use OZW 1.6 instead of 1.4 (the non -dev versions are 1.4)
Regarding the range issues - the frequency that Zwave runs on is susceptible to RF reflection. Basically this means metallic objects bounce the signal back and cause interference. It interfere more the faster the bandwidth goes (and Zwave+ will go 100K - 40K - 9.6K - and retries will lower the bandwidth etc on each subsequent try)
If you have lots of “metal” in your house - it could be the source of the issue?
I saw a screenshot where your RTT was average 6 seconds and last one was 8 seconds. This is Terrible!
Assuming your virtual machine isn’t overloaded (and thus slowing everything down) I’d try doing this in different parts of your house and see if you can get that RTT down. If you can by simply moving things to a different floor etc for testing then you know you have RF issues and even if you sort out the way things are working - it’s going to be a terrible experience if you have to run it from it’s current location.
If you do get better RTT times by moving the stick to a different location, the zwave2mqtt running on a RPI behind a couch/plant etc in a good location and talking back to HA via MQTT is probably your only choice right now.
So I wiped all my zwave stuff again, made the tweaks mentioned above for Ubuntu for modemmanager and loaded things. However this time I took my Z-Stick to the flood sensor and paired them. Two things:
So it paired and came up and was able to rename things. Looks like it didn’t pair secure. Is there a way with the Aeotec Z-Stick to force a secure pairing when not thru HA? For the flood sensor it just always says click the button three times.
Also this time even though it’s there and working, doesn’t show on the Z-Wave card:
Is that wrong?
Unlike before that all the entities showed as circular values at the top it now shows as a card
You don’t need to secure pair devices unless required ie: Door locks, Garage Door openers, the security adds overhead (doubles the packets sent/recved). Normally pairing via just the stick isn’t recommended and shouldn’t hurt anything.
As for your frontend UI showing the cards different, that’s totally separate and doesn’t mean anything to zwave really. That’s just a HA UI thing.
I think when I rename the nodes that change happens. Interesting wet the thing, alarm going off, alarm for water, or movement and that flood sensor says Off and the second flood sensor never does anything.
Edit, so here’s what I have using the above list of values:
When moved, Tamper Alarm Level and Burglar switched to 3
When wet, Flood Alarm Level and Flood switched to 2 and Alarm Type switches to 5
Flood 2 does nothing
General sits at 255
Binary sensor always stays Off
Source Node always 0
The external probe when put in water sets off the alarm and shows a solid 2
The bottom of the unit sitting in water flickers 2 on and off very erratically.
Besides the above and if there is more work that can be done or not, I read somewhere that you have to enable the binary sensor. Is this true and how?
Also is this normal? I now have a wired flood sensor in the basement which linked to the stick and a battery powered one that shows not connected but it did successfully include in it’s current location.
Battery still at 70% but what you gonna do. Out of curiosity my one battery powered device checked in 6 minutes ago and updated the temperature but now says Initializing (CacheLoad). Is this unusual?
Ya the RTT on that device looks good, and zwave_plus should report status instantly to the zwave stick, but as in all things, it depends on the firmware of the manufacturer
I’ll try triggering it in a bit again but I do have this in there as well if it matters which is supposed to improve the responsiveness of my code for monitoring the washing machine states.
