Z-Wave, Smoke Sensors how to use

dzjr · January 14, 2020, 10:08pm

I’m stuck…

I am busy moving from Domoticz to Home Assistant,
A number of things worked “out of the box” but But other protocols such as Z-Wave, i am after a few days’ trying stuck …

I mainly use the Z-Wave for the smoke detectors, I want to send a Push message via Pushover.

My configuration is:
Z-Wave.me usb stick
2x Fibaro Z-Wave smoke detectors
4x Heimann Z-Wave smoke detectors
1x Popp Z-Wave smoke detectors
1x Z-Wave socket plug

Now I have plugged the Z-Wave USB into the HASSIO server without any adjustments from the Domoticz Pi, and I also see that there is communication with the POPP and the plug.

According to the config the Fibaro sensors would also work, at least I see the temperature graph.
I tried to register two of the Heimann sensors several times, it looks like they have been registered, but I don’t see any changes, some are unknown or something …

The large amount of components that the sensor produces also does not really help to choose the right one.

Now I have tried to trigger the Fibaro and Heimann detector with smoke, this works really well (the siren can be heard) but I see nothing in H-A turning into alarm …

I have now installed the Z-Wave Graph and see half a network.

After 3 days of messing around and testing, I am just stuck, and am thinking about running a Domoticz server for only the Smoke Detectors, but this should also be possible with Home-Assistant i think…

What am I doing wrong?

Are there perhaps tools to better manage Z-Wave in H-A?
In Domoticz you visually get the message that a node has been added, and you can also adjust the sensor data easily and clearly.
But in H-A I personally find it very unclear and vague …

I hope someone could help me with this …

thank you in advance!

truglodite · January 14, 2020, 10:25pm

To see ozw output when adding and playing with devices, use the tail option at the bottom, with a value of like 50. This will show a scrolling list of ozw commands, provided you haven’t changed logging options elsewhere in ha.

Why the smokies don’t work… Have you tried again with the latest openzw source? To do that, download and unzip the contents of a clone of the openzwave repo to a folder “/config/zwave”. Now add to your configuration.yaml zwave:

zwave:
  usb_path: /dev/ttyACM0
  config_path: /config/zwave/config

Now try to re-add the smokies and hopefully they work this time.

Yeah having so many useless entities with zwave adds can be annoying. IIRC ha recently added a feature that fixes this, where you can tell it to hide any new entities of a certain flavor (like hide all future additions of source node id). Havent played with that, but pretty sure it is there.

Beware though that sometimes those odd entities, even though 90% of devices do nothing useful, can sometimes be nice to have. For example, I have ecolink devices that send tamper status to the burglar entity… and a monoprice vibe sensor that uses ‘alarm’ for tamper reporting. So before casting an entity type forever to the sea, play with the device and see if you can find all the related reports on ha. For this reason, I don’t use that auto hide feature… afaik it can’t be tied to specific devices so good chance of missing a tamper entity or similar of you use it blindly.

Fishwaldo · January 15, 2020, 12:24am

Using the latest OpenZWave source is heading for trouble. The latest version of OZW is 1.6 and HA is still on 1.4. There are changes to the config files between the two versions and while you may get away with no problems, the chances are high that things will not work.

HA has the latest 1.4 config files already. There is no need to update.

finity · January 15, 2020, 10:43pm

You’ve been bitten by the HA zwave entity bug. But unfortunately it’s not a bug but a feature.

The best thing you can do is remove all of your devices from the stick and then re-add them one by one and re-naming them to something useful between additions. Make sure you make all of the added entities match in the base of the name to make it easy to figure out which entities go with which device.

For example

zwave.fibaro_detector_1
binary_sensor.fibaro_detector_1
sensor.fibaro_detector_1_alarm_level
sensor.fibaro_detector_1_alarm_type
sensor.fibaro_detector_1_burglar
etc.

make sure you are looking at all of the entities for each device in the states page (renaming them as above will make filtering them easier). Sometimes the entity that changes isn’t the entity you think should be changing. For instance it could be _burglar, or _alarm_level, etc.

My first alert detectors use both “_alarm_type” and “_alarm_level” to indicated different status (smoke, CO, & testing)

And sometimes you won’t necessarily even see the entities states changing at all because those devices might just generate a zwave event that you will need to capture to do anything with.

My AEOTEC doorbell works like that.

you can see the zwave events in the developers tools->events page and listen for zwave events at the bottom of the page.

dzjr · January 16, 2020, 9:29pm

Thank you for the help and tips.

Especially the tip of the log from @truglodite helped to see one of the detectors coming in, it turned out to go to value 255, so tried to make an automation to Pushover, but that didn’t work, which was ultimately a bug in the ymal script, stuck a beginner’s mistake i think.

This weekend I will try to get the heimann sensors up and running, I think I had already added one, but the are nog in the network map.

For Fibaro and Heimann sensors, is there no overview of which ID is used for which function within HA?

I’ll keep you informed!

truglodite · January 16, 2020, 9:37pm

Not sure if the one reporting 255 has a zwave command option to report binary, but I had a similar problem with my aeotec gen5 recessed door sensors reporting 0/255. Fortunately there was an available zwave command, in configuration/zwave/(select the node)/node config options/config parameter, to “enable basic and binary reporting”. Toggling that on brought them to life.

Otherwise, you could whip up a template to convert from 0/255 to on/off… yeah being a beginner with yaml sucks (at least when I learned C, I could see my mistakes, but with yaml one empty space could bring an error).

dzjr · January 16, 2020, 9:53pm

I will try to trigger the detector again, maybe I will see something being triggered.

Personally, I find the settings options as they are in domoticz, with a layer behind which you can monitor and adjust various things a lot clearer.
I use a ConBee stick for ZigBee, and that works very easily, something like that would also be easy for Z-Wave.

I have already made enough typos with programming in C/Arduino, but I think everyone has spent hours going to search for a missing ; or a } or prehaps using almost the same name but with one character different, I think.

dzjr · January 18, 2020, 6:49pm

I have the notifications working!

Through the log I could indeed clearly see what was triggered in the event of an alarm, and with which I can therefore make a trigger for the notification.

The only thing that I now encounter is that I see in the graph that now the sensors are in place have no connection to the HUB, is there perhaps a solution for that?
Or does the mesh network not work with sleeping nodes?
Yes i did use the repair function.
I have two nodes that are in the config but do not exist (11 &15).

dzjr · January 18, 2020, 6:54pm

Does anyone know how the group associations work, and whether you can link sensors from different brands together?
Or should I make an automation for that, although that is not my preference …

bernhard · November 5, 2020, 8:41am

afaik thats not possible, so I bought an Aeotec Siren and bound all of them to the siren which is placed in our bedroom.