So with the news that Samsung is gonna brick my v1 SmartThings, I thought I would give Home Assist a try. Unfortunately I’ve had no luck switching away from ST in the past; no other Z-Wave controller seems to work with it.
I got a Raspberry Pi and Aotec Z-Stick Gen 5, had no problem installing the software and Z-Wave JS and getting the stick to work, but as usual while my lock would connect and be successfully interviewed it completely fails to control or update. Any attempts to change the lock state simply time out in the log.
It shows up as an “Allegion” lock instead of Schlage, although I suppose they’re more-or-less the same thing? I wanted to be able to get a better sense of what’s going on, so I installed ZWaveJS2MQTT and nothing about the device controls make sense:
First, did you add the lock securely? Those options you are looking at there are more or less the behind the scenes parts you may want to at some point adjust some of those settings, but for now did you get a lock entity created in home assistant that you can lock and unlock? After you get the basic lock/unlock part working you may want to look into something like keymaster
But if you are just starting with HA I would look into HACS first if you haven’t already as that will make everything easier… https://hacs.xyz/
I’ve tried both secure and non-secure, the results are the same.
I was able to create entities back when I was using the Z-Wave JS integration directly, but they couldn’t lock or unlock, or get status updates. The API calls would time out. I haven’t figured out how to create entities with ZWaveJS2MQTT.
It most definitely has to be secure, so if it currently isn’t I would remove and re-add securely…
under configuration > integrations > do you have a Zwave js integration there ? Clicking configure should then give you some basic Zwave network information… maybe you can screenshot that page it should look something like this:
Well, after a dozen additional attempts (I made it to Node 18 by the time it worked) I finally have it working.
Over the course of my experiments I uninstalled ZWave JS and switched to OZW (which gave me a more in-depth control panel). In OZW I was eventually able to get it to connect, load all of the configuration, and successfully send commands. Once I had it working for a while I migrated it back to ZWave JS (as OZW didn’t have information on my MIMOLites for some reason), and it’s continuing to work for now.
I still don’t know why it wouldn’t send messages all those other times I tried. I sincerely hope this is the last time I need to set up this network, though.
FYI to do standard includes, you can have the zwave stick anywhere it can be reached. however when you do a secure include, it has to be within 3 feet of the devices. if not it won’t include correctly. this is a a security feature. also since you are a new HA user a tip. if you are using an SD card, move to an SSD asap. SD cards are notorious to fail and lead to a poor user experience. Finally the ZwaveJS is still beta, the original zwave (deprecated) plugin works great with the lock.
Yeah the USB stick was less than a couple of feet from the door lock throughout the entire process. /shrug
I’m using a Raspberry Pi but I didn’t realize HA was available for Synology Diskstation, which I have one running with SSDs. I may try to migrate it over… don’t know how much of a pain that’s likely to be, though. Everything’s working just fine… for now…
pi works fine its the SD card that is a problem. to move to synology, you’ll want to back up all your yaml config files. put them on the nas and reboot a few times. the only issue would be the zwave stick pass through. I don’t have a synology, so I cant offer any guidance there, but I’m sure it’s possible.
