I had some problems with 2 different unresponsive z-wave dimmers. They worked alright for weeks and then they died and did not send or receive anything on z-wave. A restart of HASS did not solve anything. Breaking the electricity to the dimmers (and rebooted them) solved the issue, for a while…
I contacted the manufacture support. They were really helpful and showed my how to move my usb-zwave-stick to a Windows PC and updated the dimmers (still in the network, I did see hail request from other nodes, quite cool).
Now the minor problem is that I want to verify that I got the new version on the dimmer nodes. It did say 1.02 before the update, that that was expected since it was a valid, old version. I updated it to 2.03. But Configuration->Z-Wave->Nodes->Node Information->Application Version still says 1.02.
The update tool said everything worked alright and restated the node. I opened the zwcfg_xxx.cfg and the version is coded into this file. Is this ever updated after the node are added?
The file is only normally written after stopping the z-wave network, which is done when restarting HA. You can write it while online by clicking the “Save Config” button in the control panel.
Assuming you’ve restarted already, try clicking “Refresh Node” in the control panel, works especially well for wired devices. You can then click “Save Config” to check the cache file, if the UI doesn’t seem to be updated.
The more extreme option is to remove the zwcfg*.xml file entirely (with HA shutdown). It will be regenerated, as long as you don’t have any manual edits. You may need to operate the devices or wake them up (battery). Save a backup.
Refreshing the nodes did nothing in UI or in file (even after saving manually). But its good to know at what events the file are saved (since the last save date were some days ago).
I may try rename the file after shutting down HA, or even move to the “Z-Wave to MQTT” plugin (that seems really cool). Moving to this plugin should have the same effect? The main reason for me not to move to this plugin were the uncertainty of rebuilding the zwcfg*.xml file…
In “theory”, it should always be safe to lose the cache file, because that’s all it is, cache. It does tend to cause HA users trouble though, because without the cache file OZW can’t know all of the different values (which are essentially HA entities) that are supported, without either re-discovering them (which is basically what Refresh Node does), or create them when it seems them (e.g. turn a switch on or off). It’s worse for battery devices because the only update every so often, whereas wired devices are always available to get their info.
If you don’t copy the cache file to zwave2mqtt the same thing will happen.