I’m moving from 1.7 to 2.1 and I have a fairly large Z-Wave network to move. My 1.7 has an Aeon z-stick v2 whose battery only lasts a few seconds when unpluged. My 2.1 will have a z-stick gen 5.
Will running two z-wave networks at once during the transition cause problems?
How should I best include devices on the new controller? I ditched the Pine64 z-wave module because it was static, many devices are >15 meters from the controller and network wide inclusion didn’t seem to work with all of my devices. My plan was to take the z-stick around, put in inclusion mode and then add my devices. Should I return the controller to the Pine64 after every device or should I add as many at once as I’d like? Does taking the stick around to the devices cause potential network mapping issues?
I have 40+ z-wave devices to add to the new 2.1. Only about 10 are still on the 1.7 install. If I cannot exclude them from the 1.7 install due to the batter issue, is there a best practice for removing each device using another controller before putting onto the 2.1 network?
I’ll give the battery backup another try tonight. One the first try it still went dead but might have had a low battery. I also noticed that the Aeon stick manual said that it needed to be disconnected from the device to work for inclusion/exclusion but not sure if batter applies as a device.
The battery backup didn’t work as planned. The z-stick would not go into exclusion mode while plugged into anything. I did however use the device to keep the stick on until I removed it while near the device to put it into exclusion mode. Seriously, one would hope that Aeon would have an option to replace batteries on something so critical to controlling one’s network.
Thank you for the suggestions. I understand that I can remove a device from a network with and controller. I was thinking that I wanted to remove it from the actual old controller in case I was going to use the device for some type of test network.
Is there anything that I should consider when including my Z-wave devices? I was planning on walking the controller around with it in inclusion mode to add my devices. Should I do them in any special order? Should i only do a few at a time before returning the controller to my openHAB system (Pine64)? Do I need to stop or restart anything when removing and then reinserting the z-wave controller?
When I moved to Aeon G5, I took about one or two room at a time, this way it is easy to spot troublesome nodes. I have about 60-70 zwave nodes.
I first made a list of all my devices in a google sheet, location (room by room), node address, and manufacturer/type, battery device or not, and finally a oh operating status. I continue to use this, updating with issues I’m seeing on nodes.
Also devices that are unpowered or even unused are in the list.
Then I simply followed the list, and this way, the node address where arriving in kind of sequential order.
You need to stop oh before removing the stick, and once you have re-plugged it again, start oh. This might be different on different platforms though. (I’m using the snapshot on a vanilla linux box)
also make sure you plan for the Unknown Device issue when itegrating battery devices with the Aeon G5. Since the stick is not storing all the device Information some battery devices will come up as Unknown Device when you finally plung in the stick and do the Integration in openHAB2. This happens you will have to manually wake up the device up to 10 times, so the additional Information is broadcasted.
About the exclusion: I am running a testbed with a Z-Wave.Me stick and every time I Switch the devices between testbed I factory reset the device to make sure I start with a plain set of parameters on the device.
In my case I just choose ignore in HABmin. And from time to time I just factory reset my testbed Ccontroller as well.
