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

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21

Every hour or so ? Sound like a cron job… are you sure you edited the crontab ? I’m running an older firmware versions on my edge - newer firmwares / other vera models might have different scritps…

crontab -e

or

nano /etc/crontab/<something>

then do

ps aux

to see what’s running from time to time and add them to the kill-list
also, if you want an “auto-refresh” process list try

watch -n <seconds> ps aux

As far as I know, resetting Vera to defaults still works if you keep the reset button pressed at boot - so if you don’t go really crazy deleting files / stopping processes in the worst case you’ll have to recover from backup…

22

I think I fixed it. 12 hours of uptime with no reboot. Here’s the solution if anybody will have similar problems.

My configuration: Vera Plus, UI7, firmware: “1.7.3798”, zwave_version : “6.1”, no 3rd party plugins/apps.

Vera rebooted itself exactly every 1 hour 1 minute. The service responsible for the reboot was NetworkMonitor; to disable it I had to edit /usr/bin/Start_NetworkMonitor.sh (in the same way as the other two scripts mentioned at the beginning of the thread):

sleep 120
exit

Just in case I also edited out in the same way StreamingTunnelsManager.sh although it might not have been necessary.

Please be aware that as soon as you disable NetworkMonitor Vera servers will consider that your device is offline - which is reasonable as Vera software is no longer running on this device.

23

Started tinkering with this yesterday, seems to work OK so far.

@buen0s @quasar66 Just a question for you two, did you have to readd all your devices to the zwave network? My devices show in home assistant but none are functional

24

I left Hass running 15 minutes the first time, then write zwave config, then full restart, then another 15 minutes and a full restart - apart from a battery device everything else was working fine. But as far as I know some devices only configure themselves correctly with Hass if you add them while Hass is running…

25

The zwave entities are created properly, however the switch entities are created as switch.switch, switch.switch_2 etc and are not functional.

Excluding and including fixes this tho!

Thanks for the great work, happy to not have to deal with the vera ui anymore!

26

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

27

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?

28

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.

29

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

This works great now, stable for three days straight!

30

can you use more than 1 Vera in this scenario?

32

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.

33

@ 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.

34

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!

35

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.

36

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.

37

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

38

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.

39

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

40

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

41

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.