My Raspberry Pi 3B running HASSIO locked up twice recently so I concluded that the uSD card was bad. After reintstalling HASSIO on a new card and enabling the Z-Wave integration, HA finds all of my Z-Wave devices but for the switches, where Overview used to display sliders that allowed me to control the swtiches, it now only displays their status of “Ready”. How do I get back to having switch controls in the interface?
The entities that are showing in your interface are the zwave.xxxx entities, this is just the device itself and reports if it is ready or sleeping or whatever and some additional information. However you need to have the switch.xxx entities to be shown in the interface.
Ok, so my next question is how to make my switch entities display. Where do I even specify them? This is really odd because, in November, HA automatically created slider switch icons for each when I started my Z-Wave network after adding the Z-Wave integration. It still creates Lovelace controls for my thermostats, but not for my switches. However, I know that all of the features needed to operate my switches are still stored in my Aeotec Zstick because I can operate them from openHAB when I insert that uSD card into my RPi 3B.
I started building my home automation system on openHAB but, when I found that doing real automation required using a library of undocumented Java classes, I switched to Home Assistant figuring that YAML lists would be simpler to program. I went a long way with HA until my RPi repeatedly crashed with the the only recovery method being to flash a fresh copy of HASSIO on uSD card. This updated my HA version by a few months with this very different treatment of Z-Wave.
When you go to the Sidebar -> Developer Tools -> States, do you see any entities starting with switch.?
I see zwave, person, sun, sensor, but no switch entities so that must be the problem. I don’t remember any documentation on creating entity types but I’ll search some more. It used to be that HA created a switch entity when it added a switch device. I’ve tried to remove all Z-wave devices and add them again to do so but I’m not sure that I really removed everything from my Z-stick. I am willing to rebuild my entire software system if that is what it takes but somethings are hard to reset.
What kind of z-wave devices are you using? You don’t need to create entity types, the switch entity should be created automatically. What zwave. entities do you see, only the stick or all your devices?
I am using quality Leviton Z-Wave switches that are fully operable from openHAB but not from Home Assistant. I am also using 2 RCS thermostats that are fully operable from HA and 2 Aeotec energy meters that are completely visible in HA.
Sounds like the cache xml isn’t populated properly.
I have looked at that and don’t see mention of switches. How do I fix or regenerate the zwave xml?
On one of your switch devices try the “Refresh Node” button from the zwave control menu.
I tried that on two switches but there is no feedback that anything happened. I still don’t see a switch entity in the Developer Tools -> States page or in Lovelace. I do remember once seeing a Z-Wave xml file but I can no longer find it. What is its name and directory? How do I recreate it if it is missing? I do see a Z-Wave SQLite database pyozw.sqlite, as well. Does that need to be updated or fixed somehow?
After my system crash I tried to do a clean install but that seems to be more involved than I expected, i.e. not everything is stored on the RPi SD card but some is in the Z-Stick Z-Wave controller.
ozwcache_XXXXX.xml where the XXXXX is your HomeID
Press Save Config at the top of the Zwave Control Panel
No this file isn’t used for anything really.
If you have a backup of your config directory you could restore the cache file from that while Home Assistant is turned off.
If you are not making daily/weekly backups, highly recommend you start especially if you’re using a SD card.
Thanks! That restored my Z-Wave configuration xml only it looks like the name is now zwcfg_0xbf0e492.xml. Funny that what I attempted to be a clean install, not using any of my possibly corrupt or incorrectly created files, didn’t create this.
I agree with your distrust of SD cards. Once I get past the basic configuration that HA does automatically, I intend to implement the rigorous backup hierachy on HA that I use for my PC files. I’m curious how reliable users have found an RPi to be for running HA and what they have done to improve it. After experimenting with HASSIO as the easiest and most standard implementation of HA, my intended deployment platform is my Synology NAS. I’ve been running my house for 15 years very reliably on an HAI Ommi II so I’m not switching over to one of these computer-based home automation softwares until I’ve proven similar reliability on my breadboard of Z-Wave and DSC security panel devices.
I gets written when the zwave network shutsdown aka restarting Home Assistant, or if you press the Save Config button 
I use a Pi for my setup, I just don’t use a SD Card anymore, I attached an external WD Passport drive to the USB for the storage.
Some have reported weird issues with Synology + HA + Zwave. I’d do a forum search to make sure there’s solutions.
I’ve been running my home off HA since it was built 3 years ago and have integrated various devices from Zwave to ESP8266 devices, all rock solid for me.
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