Hi everyone,
Ok just consolidating a few responses here and concluding this thread:
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I am using a 5m USB extension cable, I switched it down to a 1m one as I thought the longer cable was the problem. I have now switched it to a 30cm one. No difference.
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The wallmote configuration is a little annoying, but I get it. If I’m honest, that is a bit of a pain in comparison to the Smartthings setup which I feel was quite seamless.
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I spent a whole day trying to flash the Zooz stick on my mac (with a VM). No dice. In the end, Zooz support confirmed the stick is actually working using my Zwave JS UI method mentioned earlier.
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I’ve removed the dead node, and re-added it, but each time it seems to be added with even less info. It’s completely unusable. No matter what I tried, how i included it or how many times it was re-interviewed it got worse.
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The only device I have successfully added so far is a Ring Contact sensor, which was added as the wrong entity type. Despite changing it to a door sensor, it’s still a bit of a nuisance as there are so many dummy entities it’s added. It’ll be quite the effort to attempt to figure out which entity is what (acceleration, tamper, etc) and then replicate for the 30+ contact sensors I need to add.
Every other system I’ve integrated into HA, I’ve not looked back and each time it’s been a significant upgrade. However, this time, I feel completely different.
The Smartthings setup as a Zwave/Zigbee gateway into Home Assistant is annoying.
It’s slow, uses an app that gets worse each year, has high latency and constant outages. However, despite that, it works (in some fashion) ~80% of the time.
This current setup of using Z-wave JS (UI) is incredibly fiddly for someone like myself, is quite a headache to use and most importantly has resulted in 0 usable devices.
The kicker for me was when I decided to re-pair all of the devices in this thread this morning to Smartthings, just to see if they’d work, and within minutes they were all usable functional and paired. It was idiot-proof.
As a result, I’ve decided to return the Zooz stick and will re-visit when the HA Zwave implementations are more mature and polished.
For now, I think I’ll just replace my Smartthings hub with an Aeotec Home Hub and pair my devices to that in an effort to reduce some of the issues with my V1 Smartthings hub, which in turn will be linked to Home Assistant.
Thank you to everyone that tried to help me get this going, I appreciate all of your efforts!
For anyone else that is of a similar effort and iQ level to myself, my guidance would be not to attempt the Zwave transition into HA just yet.