I was suspecting something like that. I will try this when I get home. Thank you!
In short yes. Put the vera in inclusion mode and the zway controller in learn mode. The zway will get itself added to the network and will acquire the security key from the vera (secure key exchange). It took me a couple of trial and error to get the security key to exchange properly but this was back when the vera was very chatty with insane overhead. This should enable your zway to control all you devices but not all sensors will report back to zway yet. You can then run the equivalent to the vera configuration by interviewing all the nodes.
As I said some devices will not like accept more than 1 lifeline associations and some nodes will not like having anything but node 1 as its lifeline associations. This will depend on your devices and if you have devices like these, you will have to swap node ids between your controllers. I have done this a few times in the past…
I bought two Veras. I paid for vera plugins. Not sure why I wouldn’t pay for Homeseer. Having said that, I have several free HS plugins from non HS devs. Last time I checked, there were 75+ free plugins. It’s up to devs to charge or not. If most HS plugins have a cost, I guess those devs want to code for a living.
Mine runs for months on end without issue so if it has a memory leak, it’s a darned slow one. I haven’t topped 6 months of run time yet but the power outage outlasted my UPS so we’ll see how it goes this year.
Age of a code base doesn’t bother me. Having 20 years of experience is a nice thing. And they have experience manufacturing a host of zwave devices as well as making controllers, which gives them insights. Not to mention a solid revenue stream outside their controller.
I’d like vera/ezlo to get to the point HS is at, with a varied product line that hits a lot of the market. Competition is good. I look at the light switches that come from zooz, innovelli and homeseer and want that kind of variety in the controller space. Hubitat is probably putting some leverage on HS. Sadly, more than vera is right now.
I don’t have an issue with hass.io or hass-core or whatever it got renamed to last month, I just don’t have the time to spend on fighting with yaml or whatever. I spent that energy during the ipchains/iptables, perl/python/php eras of linux. Now I will spend a modicum of money to save that time and energy for other things. Not Control4/Savante money, but still, money. I used to spend that money on vera until the “dark times” drove me away.
For those of us who just want it work out of the box, hass.io ain’t ever going to be the option we choose. I avoided hubitat because their cpu is dinky and I knew it would have performance problems at scale and that’s what’s happening now. Isy is in need of a total platform refresh, even if their core real-time OS is rock solid. These days you need the option of the cloud even if you dont want to depend on the cloud, and adding a polyglot server sounds awfully close to yaml files. So…Homeseer.
Let’s see if EzLo can get back in the market with a good product and win back some mind share.
Not a huge fan of HomeSeer myself, but let’s face it, it works and as I said is one of the only two local processing solutions available with the more advanced features. All of the open source versions are based on openzwave which I have tinkered with as well but is still a bit too cumbersome to setup and does not support S2 and Smartstart besides a much more complete control over command class frames with a friendly interface. I am a big proponent of opensource myself and use Home Assistant pretty extensively. Just not for zwave and for automation because… yeah I don’t love yaml. So for me it is either zway or HomeSeer bridged into openluup.
And if you don’t think S2 matters, look at all the thread about new devices failing configuration, and association in the past 2 days alone… These devices all support S2.
And shall I add, I am very much saddened as well as disappointed that vera couldn’t cut it. It had so much potential but at the end I feel that the lack of discipline and consistency along with a poor design in the software made it unscalable. There are so many good ideas and so many things well done on the UI. It just was not released, tested properly and above all was never designed to be able to handle more than a handful of devices and even so, not reliably enough to be in home security.
Not quite sure what you’re meaning here? There’ve been lots of times in the past that people have asked for this sort of list (on a ‘normal’ Vera) with solutions provided (sometimes by me!)
Examples here:
Is this a question about something different, or am I missing something?
As noted in one of the posts above, AltUI has the Table Devices page with an option to include ALTID. Also, the openLuup Console has also has a similar page, and I could easily add ALTID to that too.
AK,
Just looking for an easy way to list all my zwave device name with the ALTID so I can rename my device in zway based on the ALTID from the zwave network
You need a controller which can do that. The vera could physically do it but the software doesn’t show you the option so support would have to go down one level maybe and send the command classes manually though the serial API.
Otherwise I put out an illustration of z-way. Most openzwave based controllers can do this like domoticz or home assistant. I think I remember Homeseer can do it too. Vera is very far behind in the zwave control area.
Some splitting and merging of threads made the discussion here a bit hard to follow…
To give an update, I think we got the z-way2 bridge to the point where I can pivot my entire 150 node zwave network to z-way and get rid of the luup engine.
I had another luup reload 3 days ago while I was sleeping due to the zwave command queue deadlock caused by a combination of “Got CAN”, “NONCE Get Flood”, “Wait for 20000”, “Wait for 2000”. Yes this unrecoverable failure is rare, but still too frequent to my taste averaging once every 20 days. The recoverable ones are 3-4 times a day out of which maybe one is noticeable every 2 days but none of this is acceptable.
I already validated that I get none of these problems on z-way under the exact same environment and network. So while eZLO is releasing the firmware and hardware which changes everything, including what worked, and without certainty that what didn’t will be any better, I am keeping what worked (and enhanced by openLuup and ALTUI) and replacing what didn’t with minimal efforts. Thank you @akbooer for all the hard work to make this possible. Not forgetting to give gratitude to @amg0 for ALTUI.
No more noodling and bandaging of vera for me…
So, where and what do you run zway? Are you saying you are leaving vera completely?
Edit: I am going to investigate zwave2mqtt based on ozw1.6 for Vera replelacement and hass as the brains.
Since vera support is despitely disappointing me over and over again. It’s always the device that’s the problem. I can’t currently in or exclude anymore…
Yes, I am replacing vera completely. Zway as you can see in the diagram is within the same VM as openluup on my NAS. It bridges openLuup with all my zwave devices which is what my vera was left to do and did not even do well enough.
I am heavily invested in scenes on openluup. It is the master of my system. I also by far prefer lua to yaml.
Hass for all the good things it does, also has some drawbacks. Amongst which the amount of arguably useless breaking changes going through versions obsolescences. While it is moving fast, they are sometimes not very fast at implementing fixes I pushed to them. I even had to maintain my own fork for sometime to keep my system working and had to merge the updates manually. Pretty tedious.
Z-Way is still vastly superior to anything openzwave. Interface and control of the zwave stack at the command class level (meaning there is practically no device which can possibly unsupported), S2 and SmartStart.
I can help with everything up the the hass part… You would need a new component to bridge the zway API in written in Python. There is one for hubitat humorously but if you are patient you may get to use the new openzwave interface from fishwaldo. He is making progress but for my use case… I already pretty much have what I need.
Here’s an interesting article on Home Assistant’s new Z-Wave integration (available for testing). This new integration will use OpenZwave running in an independent docker from HA and communicate via MQTT directly.
Here is a very informative thread on the future of ZWave which includes detailed comments from fishwaldo (author of OZW) and the developer of CQC’s new Zwave driver.
The expert comments here echo what @rafale77 has been saying about the evil of frequent polling, nightly heals, etc.
Lastly, SiLab’s Z/IP gateway was discussed as a bridge to existing hubs and alternative to OpenZwave. I wonder if it would be possible for eZLo to push a firmware update to the Zwave chip in the Vera hub to incorporate the Z/IP bridge firmware?
