Have a zwave switch that shows up as: n-Wall Paddle Switch, 300S (45609 / ZW4001) by GE.
Zwave JS UI is not running so clicked on the button to start it and got the message:
Error starting the add-on
I have a Zooz 700 S2 USB zwave stick that has been working. It just stopped working what I was away for some days on a trip. We may have had a power interruption but it has restarted ok previously.
What should I be looking for to get it working and prevent this from reoccuring? I’m a newbie with HA.
Try powering the hardware off and then unplug/replug the Zooz stick back in and power it all back on. What hardware are you running HA on?
I could do that and it would probably fix the issue. But I don’t like the fact that it just unexpectedly fails and would like to keep that from happening again. So thinking it would be better to do some digging to see if I can determine why it happened before rebooting.
I am running it on a Dell Optiplex 7040 with Ubuntu in Virtual box. HA is running - it just doesn’t switch the lights. I don’t have any other zwave items yet but suspect if I had any other zwave items they wouldn’t be working - just a wild guess.
Is “log to file” enabled in z-wave js UI? If yes you can read the last log file. you can find it in the “Store” menu of z-wave js UI (store/logs/z-ui_(date).log
That would be a good start to understand what happened.
If you can unplug/re-plug and it works it tells us something. If it doesn’t work it tells us something else.
I’ve been able to resolve a similar issue with a Zigbee stick on a RPi4 by doing that.
I’m running HA on an Intel NUC under Proxmox, and several times after an update to Z-Wave JS UI all of my Z-Wave devices went offline, and no amount of unplug/replug or power-cycling the hardware resolved it. In my case the pass-through of the USB port in Proxmox needed re-configured because the port changed after the update.
In the Add-On under Configuration there’s an option labeled “Show unused optional configuration options”. Enable that and turn up the logging level and try to restart the Add-On. Then check the logs to see if can even find the device on the USB port.
Z-wave JS logging was not enabled so I turned that on. I also noticed that start on boot was off so turned it on although it had started in the past… I clicked to start it without restarting the virtual machine and it said it was starting but was stuck saying that. The USB device is visible. At this point I think there isn’t much more to figure out without logs so am restarting.
I restarted HA (didn’t reboot PC or restart virtual box). I saw several updates available including for zwave so did those. Things are working. If it happens again I should be able to see some detail from the logs. Thanks!
Related question - I have automatic updates turned off. Is that recommended or is automatic update the best option?
It stopped working again. zwave JS UI wasn’t running. Tried to start it but took forever and never loaded. I reloaded the web page and tried to look at the zwave JS UI log and got this message:
Failed to get add-on logs, Unable to connect to systemd-journal-gatewayd
I poked around a bit and didn’t find anything obvious wrong but didn’t really know what I was looking for. Thought there would be higher level logs but didn’t find them. Where are they? I looked for available updates and see there is a core update (from 2024.4.4 to 2024.5.2). Seems like this system isn’t very stable. I haven’t set up much except one zwave switch. What do I need to do to make this more stable? I tried to load the update - it says installing but ends with still showing the old version and the need to update. Tried it twice and no luck either time.
I rebooted the whole system to get it working and was then able to install the update.
Consider putting the Dell on a UPS. This way it’ll survive a short power outage, and will do an organized shutdown on a longer outage.