Zwave Installation for New HA

Configuration Z-Wave
1

Hi all! First post here for a new SmartThings convert to HA.

Over the past 2 weeks I had setup an RPi4 with all my devices I could integrate. I’m getting the hang of things, so I decided to try out the zwave integration. I only have two zwave devices (a Kwikset lock and an Inovelli dimmer). I purchased a usb dongle and have it plugged in to the Pi.

During my reading about zwave integration, i came across the OpenZWave documentation
which indicates that “If you’re starting out with Z-Wave in Home Assistant, we recommend that you use the Z-Wave JS integration”. That sounds exactly like what I needed.

I set that up and have what I believe to be a working installation for zwave since it was able to pickup the device path on its own?? This is from the Supervisor>Configuration section:

config

Then I proceed to add the integration and looks like there were no issues and it even found 2 devices on its own (only 1 entity though).

Manage
Manage863×296 24.1 KB

After a some restarts here and there, one of the devices managed to even name itself correctly from “Node [number]” to Inovelli … so needless to say the dimmer was found. However, I can’t tell if the other device is the lock. It is indicated as Node 1, and I feel like I read somewhere that Node 1 is usually the zwave dongle. Is this correct, if so, why wouldn’t it pick up any info about itself? is it because I bought a no-name zwave dongle? Under the Devices section this is what I see:

Devices
Devices701×157 4.88 KB

I considered purchasing the Nortek and Aeotec usb dongles, but i eventually settled on this one at less than half the price of the Aeotec and a quarter of the price of the Nortek (yeah the prices for them in Canada seem outrageous).

https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B088QPLQS2/

Next question, as I mentioned above, only 1 entity was found and that entity belongs to the Inovelli light. However, I was under the impression that zwave entities should appear as ‘zwave.XXXX’ but the Inovelli entity is ‘light.lights_at_dining_room_current_value’ instead. Is there anything wrong with this?

Still along the lines of the Inovelli dimmer, should there be more entities for this device? The reason I ask is that there is a LED bar along the side of the switch that allows you to change its color which seems to be something I can’t configure at the moment. The light does function properly though within HA.

Thanks for reading this far and appreciate any insight that I can get.

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Node 1 is the dongle. Coming from experience, a cheap zwave product can be hit or miss (mostly miss).

The zwave domain is strictly for the deprecated (not sure about ozw1.6) integration. ZwaveJS can be configured through the community addon (zwavejs2mqtt), if you have it installed. If you need to configure devices, I would recommend switching over to the community one.

3

So I think I had some issues with not being able to exclude my 2 devices from SmartThings but I managed to use this dongle to perform the exclude.

Then pairing the switch and the lock was quick and painless. The lock came with a whole lot of entities but the switch still only comes with just the on/off.

I saw some inovelli specific configurations but was over my head in what they were talking about and it also seemed like it was meant for the OpenZwave 1.4 integration? At that point I wasnt sure anymore whether it was relevant or up to date.

I’m not entirely sure what zwavejs2mqtt is so I’ll need to do some reading on that but thanks for the suggestion!