Z-Wave Problems

[cbb]

Hi all!

I have a problem with my Z-Wave devices. In my current setup I plan to use two Fibaro Wall Plugs (FGWPF-102) and one MultiSensor 6 device from Aeon Labs (5C14-04S).
The MultiSensor 6 shall be used to control the two Wall Plugs based on the included motion sensor.

To connect the Z-Wave devices to HomeGenie (installed on a BeagleBone Black) I use an USB Z-Wave.me USB Stick. So far so good.

For some reason I have some problems adding the nodes to HomeGenie and I need some advise on how to debug the Z-Wave network.

First question: How can I be sure, that the Z-Wave USB stick is working correctly? In the section Settings/Z-Wave under ports I only see ttyS0-ttyS5. As far as I know the Z-Wave.me stick is /dev/ttyACM0. So I added this port manualy. I hope this was correct, at least the led of the stick is active.

Second question: If I start the pairing process, I constanly get a timeout in the "Add Node" window although sometimes a pop up messages tells me that a node has been added. Also if I use "Discovery", HomeGenie sometimes tells me that Node 2 has been updated. If I try to add a module to a group, there is one Z-Wave device in the list. Is there an other way to get a full list of all detected Z-Wave nodes?

Third question: If I add the node mentioned in question 2 to a group, which is the correct setup for a wall plug? I tried using the Swich/intelligent lights Widget but only get response timeouts all the time.

Any help would be appreciated!

Kind Regards,
Christoph

[nolio]

Hi,

First question: How can I be sure, that the Z-Wave USB stick is working correctly? In the section Settings/Z-Wave under ports I only see ttyS0-ttyS5. As far as I know the Z-Wave.me stick is /dev/ttyACM0. So I added this port manualy. I hope this was correct, at least the led of the stick is active.

I suppose that you check your "/dev/ttyACM0" in command line
If you discover some devices, that seems good !

Second question: If I start the pairing process, I constanly get a timeout in the "Add Node" window although sometimes a pop up messages tells me that a node has been added. Also if I use "Discovery", HomeGenie sometimes tells me that Node 2 has been updated. If I try to add a module to a group, there is one Z-Wave device in the list. Is there an other way to get a full list of all detected Z-Wave nodes?

You have to "wake up" (generally 3 press on association button) you device and do a "get" on HomeGenie.
For me your method to gest a list or a discover is the same and represent the real list of devices ....

Third question: If I add the node mentioned in question 2 to a group, which is the correct setup for a wall plug? I tried using the Swich/intelligent lights Widget but only get response timeouts all the time.

That will probably work after my advise about the question 2

[cbb]

Thanks for the reply.

Of course I checked if there's a device called ttyACM0 in /dev. I just wandered if there is a way to test if the communication with the z-wave controller really works.

Do you mean the section in the configuration of nodes with "get"?

[nolio]

Yes, like the following pic.

[kevin1]

I just started with Zwave a few months ago and I am not that impressed overall.  I find it to be slow and very unreliable; I don't know if it is HG or ZWave in general.  Some advice...

-focus on your wall plugs for a couple days.  I assume these are always powered devices.  They are much easier to work since they are always awake.  The sensor devices sleep to conserve power and it can be difficult to get all the zwave device info out of them... or at least it doesn't seem like they are working. 

-I too wish there were a Zwave controller status in HG that showed list of devices and status of each.  The Zwave settings - Discovery kind of does this though.  It will slowly list out the device nodes and their manufacturer data.  You can re-run this multiple times, it shows new devices and also ones that should already be there.  Also is the Zwave settings-heal network.  It has a popup that will search for devices and show you which nodes can talk to other nodes.  Its just a text list but it shows some useful info.

-I had some confusion over the pepper database.  Devices do not have to be listed there for them to work.  Each device reports its capabilities to the controller and HG.

-Unfortunately the logfile has not been very helpful to me.  Lots of timeouts but hard to understand why.  Plus it is massive for my system... like 100+MB.

My arduino sensors have been much more reliable so I know HomeGenie is a capable system.  If I could package up the arduino sensors in pretty boxes, I'm tempted to just ditch Zwave and go totally DIY.  But I can't have a bunch of arduino jumper wires hanging off of all the doors and walls.

 I'm kinda bummed about home automation after buying all this stuff and now performance is unusable.  I'd probably switch to SmartThings but they seem to have lots of trouble too. 

I think HomeGenie has great capability and potential but we need bigger community of users and developers to keep it moving forward.  Gene - we need you back :-)

[bkenobi]

There is only one developer of the HG code (Gene) but a few other contributors to various related things (forum help, APP's, etc).  Obviously with Gene being the only developer, it's a lot of work for him so I'm sure this vacation is great (and well deserved).

[cbb]

I do not get it to run.

I think that the interface between HG and the zwave USB stick is not working correctly.
Is there a way to test the zwave controller without using HG?

[nolio]

Hi,
You can try with another homeautomation program, like : domoticz, jeedom, ...
Bye

[cbb]

I checked the output of dmesg

[    8.531072] systemd-udevd[301]: starting version 204
[   11.000993] cdc_acm 1-1.5.5:1.0: ttyACM0: USB ACM device
[   11.022539] usbcore: registered new interface driver cdc_acm
[   11.022569] cdc_acm: USB Abstract Control Model driver for USB modems and ISDN adapters

and the device is also listed in /dev as ttyACM0.

So that looks fine for me.

I will try to use an other home automation software to see if the z-wave usb device is working.

Thanks for now.

[cbb]

Got it working at least for the wall plugs.

I don't really know what I did differently but it seems as if there is a delay between starting "Add node" or "Discovery" in the HG GUI and the actual start of the operations on the z-wave.me device.

What I did was:
- adding the z-wave.me usb device manually (/dev/ttyACM0) in the port section
- starting "Add node" and triggering the pairing process on the z-wave plugs multiple times until the nodes have been detected
- Used "Discovery" to check which devices have been detected
- Added a module from the z-wave part in the list of type switch to the intended group

I still have problems with the motionsensor 6. It seems to be recognized when I try to add it as a node in the z-wave configuration but it does not appear in the corresponding z-wave section of the list when I try to add a module to a group.

Should it be part of the z-wave section or do I have to add the sensor device in a different way?