Using a Vera Edge as a network-attached zwave device (skipping the vera software)

I had to re-include my devices. Wasn’t a big deal for me as I didn’t have too many of them.

did you have any problems with read-only files when editing /usr/bin/Start_NetworkMonitor.sh?

Some folders are mounted as read-only and even tho im root i cant edit the files under the folders, did you experience this?

The files actually are on a read-only filesystem with overlayfs on top. Just copy the file over itself (it usually works) then edit it - the copying actually makes a copy from the read-only squashfs to the read/write overlayfs.

Ahh didn’t really catch the importance of the copying.

This works great now, stable for three days straight!

can you use more than 1 Vera in this scenario?

Great, I got it work pretty nicely! Just a couple of things which my help others:

opkg install nano ser2net

In my new Vera Plus (firmware 1.7.4001, EU August 2018) nano isn’t available even after opkg update. I had to use the already available vi instead (here is a commands guide).

Also, to prevent frequent disconnections, I followed @buen0s advice above and disabled the network monitor script.

I also created a script on the HA side (mine is in a docker container in a Synology 415+) to try to re-establish the connection if it drops.

Now I’m trying to figure out how to let HA restart the ZWave part after it dropped. Currently, the only way for me is to restart HA entirely.

@ jiiins

I’m using this in a docker swarm (3 container for 3 veras)

I also run a cron on vera that checks if the ser2net is started and if not it restarts it.

Only one restart in a few months because power company decided I don’t need power for 8 hours and ups batteries died.

The docker above will make sure home assistant is restarted once socat is restarted, so modify the bash scripts based on your needs. If you want long-term home assistant update i would recommend using mqtt to tie in a main home assistant to a “zwave” slave using

This would allow zwave restarts without affecting everything else with the “big” price of a a few hundred megs of ram. It woul also allow you to keep a specific version on home assistant for zwave that works well with your devices and upgrade the master and the slaves independently.

There’s aso this to share data via mqtt between instances:

Hope this helps.

I currently have a VeraPlus that I’m rather disappointed with. I’ve been considering HA as an alternative and found this post very interesting. I have a couple followup questions before I go this route though…

  1. Once I’ve essentially bipassed the Vera UI, how are zwave devices added?
  2. If for some reason this approach doesn’t work for me, is there a way to restore my Vera Plus?

Thanks!

Guys, I’ve followed this excellent thread and have my Vera edge running and communicating with home assistant. My Z-wave devices are largely showing up as unknown nodes. I have 10 plug in modules and only two show up as recognised. How would i reset the z-wave devices. Removing the devices from the configuration page of home assistant doest seem to remove the devices. Should i be running a command on the Vera itself? Any help appreciated.

this looks like a great thread and thanks for all your hard work here. I currently have an unused vera plus but have all my z-wave devices running in Hass using an Aeotec Z-Stick. Does anyone have an experience of using a vera in this was versus the Z-stick. i.e. I’m considering porting everything over to the vera for better z-wave network performance. Am I wasting my time here? all thoughts appreciated.

I moved from Z-Stick to Vera Edge some months ago successfully but the zwave stuff is very slow to report through vera.
My lights switch on few seconds delayed which is annoying.
I am going to try this to see if it reduces the delay

Everything is working except for my Assa Abloy Yale Touchscreen Deadbolt (YRD220) which needs secure key
I have

network_key: "0x81,....

and I can see the lock in HA but not responding to any commands
Any idea how to fix this.

If you already have a zwave stick, use that, it’s generally faster…

I had lots of trouble with zwave stick before, could not pair devices, motion sensors not working etc.

I find the stick a little bit laggy. As I have an unused Vera I was just wondering if anyone had compared the performance between the stick and a Vera.

Since february or so I’m using multiple rasbperry pi setup the same as a vera with ser2net/socat and home assistant in docker. The Pi’s are in multiple places in the house and I have 3 small-ish networks instead of 1 huge one. The benefit is that everything is direct connection to a stick. I have around 20-30ms delay from pressing a button on the interface and the device doing whatever it should do. Each pi has a homeassistant with zwave that exports data via mqtt to a central homeassistant so working on one network does not bring all the home zwave down.

Having huge delays might be an indicator of a bad mesh, weird neighbour configuration or devices that spam the network all the time. For instance if you have a few dimmers and you set it to repot power/level/etc every 10 seconds you get a lot not useful messages… I avoided all that by using pi’s with sticks (since I use them for bluetooth scanning and other stuff i went with raspberry pi’s but i first started with a couple of vera edge which i got very cheap and they worked quite well). Moving from one vera as a zwave “slave” with one network to the same devices split on 3 networks made a huge difference - response times under 100ms unless i turn on/off everything in the house, and even then it takes a couple of seconds max…

If the stick is laggy

  • add a few repeaters, or move them somewhere else
  • re-add all your devices
  • configure report / polling time to do minimal work
  • try to move an ac powered zwave device closer to the stick and do a heal a couple of times with 1-2 hours between
  • look at home assistant logs to see how much zwave traffic is there - if there is constant large level of “noise” - reconfigure / remove devices…
  • split network in multiple networks…

I’ve seen networks with 50+ devices that worked very well crumble to a halt almost after adding a device that did something weird… The most extreme solution is to add all your devices again, one by one, until the network becomes bad, to identify the source… and always add closer devices first, and after adding one device to a heal/test and wait 20-30 minutes then test again… It’s time consuming but well worth it in the long run…

Great advice! thank you. Plenty for me to try through here.

What is the feasibility of creating a HASS.IO add-on that could automate all of the configuration steps?

Super neat work! I assume the same could be done for Zigbee support?

I assume that there is some factory reset that I can do to my new Vera Plus if this hack doesn’t work?

Keith