I’m experiencing a problem in which habmin loses touch with its zwave devices and with openhab. It doesn’t show devices connected to it and says it can’t communicate to openhab. Restarting openhab doesn’t fix it but reboot does. I’m using an Aeon Labs ZWave interface on a Raspberry Pi 2. Everything else keeps working.
The only time I’ve seen this is when I update the zwave binding jar when OH is running, but restarting OH always fixes it.
So do you still see zwave events firing after habmin has ‘crashed’?.
What version of OH and habmin are you running and which version of the stick do you have?
I think we need to get a clearer explanation of the issue…
HABmin is only a GUI - it can loose touch with openHAB if there’s a network problem or something, however this will have no impact on the zwave devices.
ZWave control is all done through the zwave binding - it has nothing to do with HABmin. HABmin only provides a GUI to interact with the binding.
So, with that in mind, I need to understand the issue… Does HABmin stay online? This is shown in the top right corner of the HABmin screen.
If the problem is really that you are loosing contact with zwave devices, and you need to reboot the computer, or power cycle, to get it working again, then I would suspect the problem is the Aeon stick if you have the Gen2. This is quite a common problem unfortunately - the stick locks up and I don’t believe that Aeon have ever found the cause. The produced some new firmware versions a while ago to try and solve it, but I saw people on the OZW forum still complaining that the issue existed after the Aeon update.
Thank you for the answers. The problem hasn’t reoccurred so far but I’m sure it will soon enough and I’ll report back here. I am using a z-stick gen 5. The main symptom is that on the z-wave binding (I have both 1.7.1 and 1.8.0 and it occurs with both) the devices just disappear. Openhab version is 1.7.1 plus I’ve added the zwave 1.8.0 binding.I need to see it fail again before giving a clear description of the off/on-line state of habmin. I know I’ve seen it off-line at times but don’t remember whether that was always the case or just sometimes.
Openhab still works after this occurs insofar as I can still access the UI and control devices.
On a perhaps related note I’m having trouble keeping the devices connected. I have a couple of smart switch 6’s and one is rock solid while the other, which doesn’t appear to be able to communicate directly with the stick but through the first one, has lost contact with the network a couple of times despite the two switches being only about 5 metres apart. Right now habmin is reporting the device has failed and the graphic network display reports no neighbours, even though every device has a neighbour according to the devices list, even the one that is supposed to have failed.
Chris
Devices shouldn’t dissappear - at least not from the binding. I can’t think of a mechanism that could cause that. The binding would need to restart, and when it restarts, the stick would need to say that there’s no devices, or if the stick didn’t respond, that might look the same…
Routing isn’t something that we have any control over - this is all done by the controller and there’s no way to know what routes it thinks are available, and no way to configure the routing, so there’s not a lot I can suggest there…
The graphic display of the network uses the neighbours list, so if the graphic display shows one thing, and the neighbours list shows something else, then that would be strange. It might indicate possible problems with communicating between your computer (ie running the browser) and the RPi that is running OH. The Pi is quite slow, and HABmin does tend to make a lot of requests for information to build these displays, so it might be that the Pi can’t keep up - we’ve seen this sort of thing in the past…
Hi Chris,
It’s either all or nothing. Individual devices don’t disappear although they go off line for no apparent reason. The smart switch I mentioned came back when I did a reinitialize node and has two network neighbours but has a red circle associated with it.
2015-12-19 09:52:04.013 [ERROR] [b.z.i.p.s.SendDataMessageClass] - NODE 7: Got an error while sending data. Resending message.
2015-12-19 09:52:08.850 [ERROR] [b.z.i.p.s.SendDataMessageClass] - NODE 7: Node is DEAD. Dropping message.
The Pi was quite busy with z-wave logging enabled and the log file grew to 932MB over the 10 days I’ve been trying to get openhab to work. It generally ran between 50 and 125% CPU (4 core processor on the Pi2) but I have removed that logging and now it’s at about 10%.
There’s a multisensor 6 right above it that is communicating (although I still have to figure out how to prompt it to send updates) and happily participating in the network. Surely zwave range should be greater than the length of the supplied USB cable. I have one more smart switch I can try to see if it’s a bad switch.
Does habmin run mostly on the browser? I can’t see a lot of client-server communications needed otherwise. There are a lot of javascript libraries involved I see.
One last question: Does it matter that there’s no smart switch 6 or multisensor 6 in product explorer? I haven’t quite got those are for, let alone how to add new definitions.
Thanks,
Chris
Yes 
One point to note - has this device ALWAYS used USB to power it, or did it once run on batteries. The device MUST be included into the network when powered the way it will operate - you can’t change it or bad things will happen.
Yes, but it communicates to the server (ie OH) via REST. It polls every few seconds to check for updates (every 5 seconds I think).
Yes, and no. It doesn’t stop the device working correctly, but it does mean you can’t configure parameters. The Multisensor 6 is in the database already though - it might have a different name (I think it uses the product ID).
Thanks again Chris. The multisensor is and has always been powered by the USB cable and I have never installed batteries in it, although I’m a little disturbed by your comment as I had hoped to put batteries in to ride through any power failures (the Pi is on a UPS).
The wifi from my laptop to the server is very reliable. I have no trouble with ssh to the pi for instance and never see echo delays which means I’m getting < 200ms round trip time.
The USB Stick is listed as Z-Stick Gen-5 Z-Wave Plus USB Controller, but the multisensor is Aeon Labs [ID:58, Type 101]. Habmin knows it’s Aeon Labs, and lists the Device ID:58 and Manufacturer ID 86 in the Information Section. I see some of the older sensors but no name or numbers that correspond to the multisensor 6.
Chris
Unless they have changed this with the newer versions, the sensor will act differently depending on how it’s included into the network. If you include it with USB power, then it won’t support the WAKEUP class, so the controller will expect it to respond immediately. I don’t know what happens if you include it on USB, and then run on batteries - it might work, but it will likely deplete the battery quickly if it’s running always awake. Basically, there’s no way that the system can know if it’s switching to battery mode, so it would have to always act like its on mains power.
Ok - wasn’t your earlier question about the Mutlisensor though - not the controller?
It’s called ZW100-A.
The USB/Battery thing sounds like a long term project. I noticed the battery reports 100% when on USB power, so maybe if it reports battery level truthfully once they’re depleted a bit openhab could tell by looking at the battery level. What to do next I don’t know - or maybe it will report the actual battery level if they are installed even when on USB power.
I only mentioned the z-stick because it was properly labelled, while the others just showed the numeric id’s in the device list.
ZW100-A is not listed in Product Explorer.
Chris
Very unlikely to work. The point is that the device reports to OH what command classes it supports. Normally if it’s running on mains it won’t report that it supports WAKEUP, and there’s no system available for a device to change its command classes on the fly. I don’t think ‘guessing’ based on battery level is going to be reliable in any way.
What version of the software are you using?
Also, unless they’ve changed the multisensors in later versions, you can’t use batteries as a backup/UPS as the usb cable goes straight through the middle of the battery compartment, meaning you can’t fit both in at once.
I’m using openhab 1.7.1. and addons 1.7.1 + zwave and weather from addons 1.8.0.
zwave is 1.8.2015.008211938 and weather is 1.8.0.201512041034
This z-wave stuff seems quite flaky so far. It’s in and out of touch with one switch and mostly out of touch with the other.
zwave is a mesh network and seems much happier when you’ve got more devices around. I bought some wall plugs purely for that purpose.
I’m not sure how that relates to the version - seems strange. In any case, I suspect that you have an old version since the ZW100 is in the database (as best as I can tell anyway).
I don’t know what devices you have, but make sure that associations are correctly configured, otherwise the system won’t know about manual updates (ie when you press the button on the lightswitch). ZWave is normally pretty good once set up, but it’s not magic
Where can I get the latest version? To be honest I’m not sure where I got the 1.7.1 addons, or whether I should be using 1.8.0 of openhab instead of 1.7.1 with the 1.8.0 zwave. I’m just not clear on that. I downloaded it then spent so much time trying to get it to start automatically with an rc.d script that I had to adapt I don’t know if I managed to do some steps incorrectly. No doubt I could save the configuration files I have and reinstall.
What do you mean by correctly configuring the associations? All I’ve done so far is click “include” then press the button on the device. Is there something more?
So far, I’ve tried.
- The Z-Stick Gen 5
- 2 x Aeon Labs Smart Switch 6: 1 works reliabily but I see errors in the log, the other paired but now is declared dead
- An Aeon Labs Multisensor 6: works but doesn’t update much. Maybe once a reboot or restart
- An Aeon Labs Key fob: Paired but declared dead by openhab. The red light comes on when I press a button which isn’t good as far as I can tell.
- A Leviton zwave light switch. Works well as an expensive light switch. I couldn’t pair it but it may be because it’s the furthest thing from the computer and of course is in a grounded metal box. I might try pairing by taking the Z-Stick off the computer and pairing it directly.