#zwave relays not using the extender

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

hollow fox
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I have zooz 800 series usb stick in my pi5 server, and a plug-in zooz 800 extender in my garage (near the front door). Somehow HA felt that my batter-operated motion sensor at my front door was the best place to route to half my devices in the garage as well as to that extender itself. Ironically, the extender is routing through a relay instead of direct to the server, and, worse, the extender is extending nothing at all, it is not being used as a relay for anything at all, despite being placed closer to the server and at what should have been a great mid-point for everything in that vicinity with no metal around it. Making maters worse, the motion sensor that is the relay hub for so many devices is itself relaying through a light switch that is next to it. This makes no sense to me at all.

I've tried removing the extender, then re-joining it, in case maybe it had gotten set up incorrectly at the begining of time and software has gotten better in using it now... that didn't fix the issue. After this i ran a network healing overnight, and indeed HA server believes the best way to route to all those devices is through a battery-operated motion sensor that is farther away than the extender. This may explain my occasionally losing devices and scripts missing actions.

Is there any way to explicitly set the routing myself? I want to simplify daisy chaining stuff if possible, and would really prefer that none of my battery-powered devices be the relay stations for other stuff. I bought a relay for that purpose. How do i do this? Do i have any choice on the routing?

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nova dagger
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  1. HA does not control routing in your Z-Wave network, that's the controller and devices
  2. Z-Wave does not allow routing through battery devices despite what you may see in the graph
  3. The HA graph is not accurate at all, see 2)
  4. You can set routes with Z-Wave JS UI
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  1. The graph is much better in Z-Wave JS UI
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  1. predicting RF behavior is not easy, location doesn't always matter
hollow fox
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the routing in the image is unexpected then. Is it a problem in data acquisition by HA that resulted in that drawing, or bugs in the graphing routine?

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I thought if i installed JS UI as add-on it would take over communications from the integration and cause problems with who's handling the dongle. Is this not the case?

nova dagger
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You can use Z-Wave JS UI or Z-Wave JS add-on (core), but only one of them.

hollow fox
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does this require removing the integration after?

nova dagger
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Although, in this case ZUI add-on is a few versions of Z-Wave JS behind the official one.

hollow fox
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... got it... so, the action is to just deal with it until software evolves a bit further so i'm looking at real paths instead of glitches.

nova dagger
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I don't have any insight into whether HA will implement routing or not, or whether they are planning to fix the graph

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I use ZUI, so none of that is a concern (to me)

hollow fox
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I see routing option in the new zwave dialog under settings... it's already implimented, just not finished yet or not working right yet. Considering it's not really a for-profit company i'm just grateful they're working on it, won't bother complaining about it yet, i'm sure they know.

nova dagger
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Where is that?

hollow fox
nova dagger
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I mean the routing option

hollow fox
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top right, visualization

nova dagger
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Ok. but where are the routing settings?

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That's just a graph

hollow fox
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yes. my original post asked if there is any way to adjust the routing manually, this is just visualization, and the visualization shows me a pretty big problem in going through a battery powered device for relay.

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in fact, it's a relay to a relay, where the second one in the daisy chain is battery.

nova dagger
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Right, there's a graph. But it doesn't mean there's any plan to implement manual routing. Maybe there is.

hollow fox
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oh. 🙁 So there's a graph only just to tease me that there's something illogical.

nova dagger
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Basically. And it doesn't even show that properly.

hollow fox
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... i guess much like the ability to control door locks but i still need to get HACS to spill a bunch of helpers to keep track of the keycodes.

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so i should wait for the js-ui to catch up in versions then switch over to that?

nova dagger
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You could just make a backup and see how it goes

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I'm assuming you're on the latest add-on version

hollow fox
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i do remember having the ability to program the neighbors on every device (with Vera), that was a super-useful function that prevented a lot of lost devices.

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... and RF distribution isn't that much of a mystery, it's pretty easy to predict what will interfere with it or cause reflections and project direction of reflections. That's where the dropouts and reflection peaks and brownouts will be.

nova dagger
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Z-Wave routing is a black box. It's not open. So you don't really know what it's doing.

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There is published documentation on how it's supposed to work, but the actual implementation is closed.

hollow fox
nova dagger
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Updating the neighbors in Z-Wave JS is just "Rebuild Routes".

hollow fox
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so those neighbor functions didn't do anything?

nova dagger
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I have never seen an API to manually set neighbors.

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That comment seems to agree.

hollow fox
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oh. Not helpful then. With Vera, turning off the nightly healing made it stable.

nova dagger
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Z-Wave JS doesn't do nightly healing

hollow fox
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I remember Vera was nightly healing, set up routing that didn't make sense, then dropouts in communication convinced it a device was a different type of device altogether, so it would reprogram that device for me, and get rid of all my customizations. It was chaos until i turned that feature off and defined the neighbors myself, using only reliable routing and AC powered devices.

nova dagger
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Old Z-Wave in HA (openzwave) used to do the same thing, and it was turned off as well.

hollow fox
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i wonder what would happen if i remove the batteries from that front door motion sensor.

nova dagger
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Pick one of the devices that appears to be routing there, download it's diagnostic file and look for the routing statistics, that'll show where it's really going

hollow fox
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... and why the one device that was manufactured to be an extender (relay) is not relaying anything at all but instead relayed itself through another.

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k. i'll try later, gotta run for now.

hollow fox
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Well, i'm no longer sure of what's going on. It turns out i have the zwave-js addon running, i'm not sure if that IS the integration or something else that has taken it over. When i turn it off the mapping visualization disappears, but comes back shortly because it just turns itself back on again. I tried installing the zwave-js ui addon, disabling zwave-js addon, starting the js-ui, but the ui has no data to show in the web-ui interface, so it doesn't use the same data as -js. And what has zwave-js to do with the integration itself?

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Additionally, i've started a network heal before heading out back on the 21st, and it still hasn't completed. It seems something isn't working right on the usb stick. I have no tools to visualize what's going on there, is the zwave network backup readable in some way?

nova dagger
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You can only run one add-on at a time with the same controller, otherwise nothing will work properly.

hollow fox
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i kind of wish that answered the questions i had...

nova dagger
hollow fox
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ok, I'll look elsewhere to reeducate myself on all those books hoping to find that one sentence that might answer my question. sorry for wasting your time

nova dagger
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The answers are there, what's wrong with reading docs? Jeez.

hollow fox
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that is of course the default. why show a picture with an arrow pointing to the screw you need when you could instead learn the entire assembly manual and watch a 30 minute video where somewhere is the 30 milliseconds showing the one frame you need.

nova dagger
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You asked like three separate questions and are expecting a single sentence summary?

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And clearly can't put any effort into it yourself. Bye.