I’m having pretty significant performance regressions after jumping over to the Zooz 800 (GPIO version) controller. My goal was to have something more reliable than my Aeotec Z-Wave stick (which is several years old). The Aeotec worked great but would sometimes disappear from the USB bus and would require power-cycling my Pi. Other than that it was working like a champ - switches and lights would toggle on and off nearly instantly, including scenes where multiple things were getting turned off and on.
On the 800 though…it’s bad. Turning a light on might be fast. But then later, the device might completely disappear from HA for a while. I’ve got the Z-Wave JS UI logging set to silly to try and spot silliness but don’t really see much? I do see some weird results in the topology though:
If I’m reading that right, communication from the node (in this case Stove from the tree, which is directly connected to the controller) is failing. Though I was able to pair it and when it’s on I get telemetry from it (watts). and see those in the log as well. I’ve run several heals (I know some say that doesn’t make things better) just to see and the topology seems to stay mostly unchanged with several devices flowing through this node. I don’t see significant dropped packets on the controller either. This is not a node that gives me issues (actually none of the nodes do, or were on the Aeotec stick since I moved from the old Z-Wave solution to ZWJS).
Previously I thought this had to do with S0 security so I tried removing all secure nodes and re-adding them to see if that helps. It’s helped some but the performance is orders of magnitude worse than my Aeotec stick.
I also tried setting the Country from USA Long Range to US just to try it, but I don’t see that it has made any difference. I’ve also tried moving the HA Pi around, at least some. That kinda helped but still, performance is just nowhere near the old solution.
I was using Z-Wave JS directly before and haven’t tried the Aeotec stick on ZWJSUI. I really hope that’s not the issue. In part because removing and re-adding 18 devices wouldn’t be fun (including several in wall ones), but also ZWJSUI is amazing!
I can reach out to Zooz to see if they have any thoughts but thought I would try here first since I’m using HA and ZWJSUI and want to make sure there isn’t anything in there I might be missing given Zooz doesn’t support either. I poked around /r/homeassistant as well and some folks seem to have great performance with this thing, though I didn’t see any obvious reasons as to why. I think many of those were using Yellow though (something I do want to upgrade to at some point soon but would like to have a functional Z-wave in the meantime).
This is sort of a continuation of Issues with zwave-server-js and ZooZ 800 GPIO Module - #13 by freshcoast but I opted to make a new thread since that one was about the proper steps to the thing to work on a Pi4 at all. That’s been solved, now it’s just a (pretty steep) performance issue.
Update, I just updated ZWJSUI to the latest version (8.7.0) just in case that was causing any issues. No real change. I also am starting not to trust the Check Health feature as being accurate. Testing it with two devices which are very close to each other still shows timeouts. I’ve run it before where it worked as expected but it seems to always fail now, even though I’m definitely getting data from the nodes.
I also noticed that small changes (like turning on a single light) seems to be pretty fast. Multiple changes (like turning on multiple lights via a scene in HA) is where things start to gum up. This would happen sometimes on my old stick but not often.
What that happens, sometimes, ZWJSUI shows a device as dead (and it gets greyed out in HA) but sending a Ping to it fixes it. Not sure why that’s happening.
Yet another update. Starting to think the issue is the onboard antenna on the module. I ended up taking one of my Z-Wave wall plugs and putting it as close as I could to the Pi. It’s now about 2 feet away. Even though some of my other devices are basically line of site, the closest one is 7 feet or so away. That one gives me a rating of 0/10 with 10/10 packet drops from the device to the controller.
The one 2 feet away gives me a rating of 7/10 with no packet drops in either direction. Much improved but also way under what I’d expect for the device being basically right next to it.
I’m going to contact Zooz about that but thought I’d share these findings with everyone.
Any updates on this? Mine randomly decided to disconnect yesterday. I’ve re-paired my z-wave lock (thankfully I only have one z-wave device) and it pairs, but then will go dead again an hour later. I’ve replaced the batteries in the lock to rule that out, I suspect it’s the zooz radio
I am having similar issues. Horrible RSSI values to all of my devices. I even bought a repeater to try and help. I have to pair the device within a couple of feet to get it to work. Then it seems to hold if I install the device in the final location, but as of recent my devices have started dropping again. I suspect it is a problem with the antenna.
I can only get mine to work reliably if my Yellow is within 10 feet of my smart lock (my only z wave accessory) this is driving me nuts because my old usb stick from my previous HASS machine worked just fine, I’m probably going to try a different module.
Edit: tried a RaZBerry 7 and still having issues. It’s either an interference issue or a Yellow issue. I’m really not sure
I was just gonna update that after restarting my Yellow and my z-wave lock, things have significantly improved. I also moved my pool controller bridge further away because I found out it uses a similar frequency to z-wave to communicate. Not sure which was the actual fix, but I’ll take it lol
Edit: just realized my RaZberry 7 came with the initial firmware release, what a process it was to update it lol, so many versions had to be progressively flashed til it would let me get to 7.36, then it wouldn’t auto update to 7.38 so I had to figure out the filename for a manual update from their hilarious visual overload of a flow chart… but I did it!
