My first steps with OpenHab

[LordLiverpool (David Pritchard)]

Continuing the account of my first steps… as discussed on this thread:

Gradual migration from Zipabox: primary and secondary controllers, etc

As I eye up OpenHab my plan is to gradually set OH in parallel with my existing Zipabox setup. Since I have a lot of learning to do, and much battling with coding and configuration files and obscure setup steps, I expect this to be a long process. I’m not in a hurry. Scanning the forum, it seems that having the two systems in parallel (albeit only one active) is feasible: Z-Wave. The trickiest bit. I can add a Gen5 stick as a secondary controller, which will copy over the device info from the …

I managed to get my Aeotec Gen5 Z-Stick set up as a secondary controller, by following this sequence:

1. Plug Z-Stick Gen5 into any USB port
2. Open Silicon Labs Z-Wave PC Controller v5.39 (getting hold of this can be a bit tricky. It’s discussed elsewhere on this forum. I can try to elaborate if anyone needs to know - if I can remember! Suffice to say that you need to register on their site.)
3. Click the gear button (settings). Click the row showing the COM port, then detect, then OK
4. Click network management
5. Click Select learn mode and NWI (Classic may also work if the Zipabox is close)
6. Go to the Zipabox and add device, Z-Wave. Zipabox says “starting exclusion…”. Don’t press anything on the Z-Stick. It will automatically be excluded.
7. When Zipabox says “starting inclusion”, go back to Z-Wave PC Controller and go into learning mode again. Now the Zipabox will find the Z-Stick. At this point I got: “Device inclusion completed. Secure inclusion failed”. I didn’t worry about this because I don’t have any security-related devices. Perhaps I should worry more, but for the moment I’m happy to get this far.
8. When I tried to connect the Z-Stick to the RPi, initially I got nothing because the extension cable I was using didn’t play well with the Z-Stick. When I connected it to another extension cable, the one I was using for the Enocean transceiver (both are too wide to be plugged directly into the USB sockets), I could see the device with the command: ls /dev/serial/by-id
9. As described above, I think, I created a symlink so that would always get a clearly understandable symbolic name for whatever device is connected to the port in question. In my case, the vendor and device IDs are:
   idProduct=“0200”
   idVendor=“0658”
   These can differ according to the version of the Z-Stick, I think.
10. That done, I added the Z-Stick manually in PaperUI. All I had to do was select the USB port (symbolic link name in this case). And 28 Z-Wave devices popped up.