Things configuration of Z-Wave items not complete

After moving my Aeotec USB-stick Z-wave-Controller to a new installation of OpenHab I only can link a few z-wave devices to things because most of the z-wave devices are not recognised yet. It doesn’t seem to help to force interview to complete the items capabilites in OpenHab. Should I manually edit z-wave device descriptions (XML files) or is there a better way to do recognition?

  • Platform information:
    • Hardware: ARM
    • OS: OpenHABian
    • openHAB version: 2.2.0
    • Z-Wave-Controller: Aeotec Z-Stick, Gen. 5

If they are battery powered you must wake them up multiple times to give the binding enough contacts with them to recognize what they are.

Editing the XML will not help. It needs to get the information necessary to communicate with it from its internal database.

Not necessarily. If you had the device up and running already with OH2 in an earlier version/snapshot you can copy the old xml file AND copy the relevant lines of the old JSON thing file database to the new installation. I have a Fibaro door/window sensor which worked until mid of December 2017 with each new install. For whatever reasons it never got recognized anymore with any newer version of the Z-Wave binding (dev version). I treid everything like clicking the button on the device for more than 30 minutes and so on. Finally I made the desperate approach to copy over all text lines from the old JSON to the new JSON and copy the XML-File in the Z-Wave folder. After a restart everything works fine. Only the last update timestamp of the XML is still 16.12.2017…but who cares…I did this 4 times now and the hack works.

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It was probably the update to the Things JSON that did it for you. My understanding (which could be wrong) is that the XML file gets generated by the Zwave binding but is not used by the binding to identify the device. So editing the XML would not help the binding identify the device.

But when you copy over the Things to the JSON, you basically have the full identification of the device as the zwave binding was able to determine it.

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This might explain why your device wasn’t coming up (check the spreadsheet)…

https://community.openhab.org/t/vision-door-windows-sensor-zd2102-open-close-and-tamper-are-not-triggered-to-different-events/27972/67?u=5iver

There are several similar devices, and the database has them all jumbled up. There is a large gap in the discussion, but it’s essentially in Chris’ court. :ping_pong:

I’ve had success with some pesky devices by copying over an existing XML from an identical device. By manually putting in the type:ID, the device was able to be recognized and complete initialization.

What devices are you having trouble with? Maybe it’s the same issue.