[SOLVED] FIBARO FGDW-002-1 - 24 units bought, 1 returned, 13 not working properly

Hi,

I’ve bought on Amazon, 24 units of FIBARO FGDW-002-1.

I own a Raspberry Pi 4 8Gb with openHAB 3.3 on a 250GB SSD via USB and I use a Aeotec Gen5+ USB pen for the Z-Wave communications, as well as two Aeotec Range Extender 7.

The house have a Cave floor (where one extender is placed), a Ground floor (where the RPi and Z-Wave pen is placed) and a First floor (where the second extender is placed).

I am using multiple switches for lights, blinds and blackouts from Simon brand, Serie 100 iO, which communicates via Z-Wave and act also as node repeaters, since they are main powered.

So the Z-Wave networks works without problems.

These are the steps I did so far:

  1. Installed Fibaro sensors one-by-one, using the “discovery” option within OH and 23 where found (one was never found, the sensor was clearly openned and used before so it was returned to Amazon as defective)
  2. After having them in the system, 20 of them I could setup the different channels with items (status, temperature, battery power, etc.) - some have less than 50% battery
  3. Only 10 I got information from (and not even consistently, because sometimes they do not transmit data)
  4. 11 units never sent any information (so everything is NULL for those)
  5. 2 units never properly connected to the system (channels were never available)
  6. Tried multiple times to reset those 13 units and reconnect them to OH, never worked (sometimes I even waited days to see if somehow it would start communicating)
  7. After a full month without success, removed those 13 sensors from OH and then connected the Aeotec USB pen to a PC and used the PC Controller (previously known as Zensys Tools) from Silicon Labs, to be able to declare as Failed and then remove those failed nodes completely from the USB pen
  8. Tried multiple times to reconnect the sensors to OH after that, but now they never even show up in discovery mode nor directly on the PC Controller software

So I am sitting here with 13 units that never actually worked (more than 600€) and countless hours already lost trying to connect this.

This is unbelievable and I never thought it would require such difficulty to simply connect some basic sensors.

I’ve worked with many different sensors from different brands, communicating via WiFi, ZigBee and 433Mhz and none of them ever gave me any headache, but these are simply a real pain and I will surely NEVER again buy these, since it is just a huge waste of money.

Now, since I cannot simply return this because it has already gone too much time since I bought it (something like a month and a half), I need to know what can I do to be able to connect this to the system since I will not simply have 600€ sitting there wasted in 13 expensive sensors doing nothing…

Any help will be obviously much appreciated.

Thank you.

Best regards,
Pedro Lima

I could speculate that despite your efforts (adding range extenders) there are communication issues. However, best when things do not go as expected is to provide Debug logs. The logs can get long, so maybe just try one inclusion at a time. Also there is a very helpful debug viewer here that produces a more readable output

It is likely that by removing with the PC controller the device itself still thinks it is paired to something. You may need to factory reset the device before trying OH inclusion. (This also could have been the issue with the open box device you returned, but that is water under the bridge)

Bob

1 Like

I’ve done that multiple times. I already reached out to Amazon and they accept the return even though more than 1 month has passed.

So tomorrow I will give it one last try (for the 254334th time) and see if it works for some reason. If not, then I will return them all and simply buy a different brand!

Probably best. Turn on debug for the sake of science if you are up for it, even if it is the 3E17E th time. :wink:

Bob

1 Like

Hehe. Will do it Bob, thanks for the help. :slight_smile:

So after some more tries on this (it’s unbelievable how unstable and hard to connect these devices are), I finally got almost all connected but 3.

So here are the steps I took besides the ones I previously mentioned:

  1. First of all, I removed all batteries from every device
  2. Then, once again, I went to PC controller software and removed the ones I had started to connect previously
  3. I then grabbed one of the unconnected devices, pressed the button, put the battery in, waited for the light to blink rapidly, released and then clicked once. It flashed quickly after a couple seconds and that’s it (this is a hard reset to the device)
  4. Removed battery again, waited some 10 seconds and inserted battery
  5. After waiting some other 10 seconds I clicked 3 times quickly (but not too quick, otherwise it does not work, and we must be holding the back button and click on the side one)
  6. Clicked on OH to scan zwave network and after some seconds, MAGIC… IT FINALLY CONNECTED AND WHEN I ASSOCIATED ITEMS THEY STARTED SLOWLY TO HAVE INFORMATION!!!

Unfortunately, for the 3 devices I still have unconnected, I had already done this procedure 3 times and are still not working. With some of the other devices I also had to try 2 times before it worked.

Also, although other zwave devices work fast and like a charm in my network, these do not work always as they should unfortunately.

Anyway, although I could put almost every sensor working so far, it’s a HUGE pain, a ridiculous amount of time invested and I DO NOT recommend Fibaro to nobody. Just no. At least not these sensors for sure!!!