Z wave gateway

I have Heatit floor thermostat and Heatit led light dimmers, they both run on Zwave, Heatit Z-Dim - Heatit (These were the only dimmer I found that fits inside 55mm frame). I now need to purchase a zwave gateway to connect these into Openhab. I also would like to have a gateway that is compatible with Alexa. This way if either Alexa or Openhab goes down my wife will still be able to control the lights without physically touch the buttons. So which gateway to get?

These thingies do not exist (there have been various requests like yours in the past).
And allow me to be frank: your intended approach is wrong. What you’re looking for (a zwave system with Alexa interface) actually IS openHAB.
Use the zwave controller in your openHAB system and have local switches available as a fallback in case openHAB does not work.
Theoretically you could setup another openHAB box (incl. Alexa interface) with a Z-stick as a SUC (secondary controller, devices will not report there but take commands).
But given the efforts, that’s overkill for the very rare event of an outage.
There’s also zwave remotes that you can carry around for this purpose.

Better put your energy into increasing reliability of your openHAB system if you feel that isn’t stable enough.
Consider using openHABian with ZRAM and its auto-backup SD mirroring feature if you haven’t already. Zram will greatly increase MTBF and auto-backup will drastically reduce MTTR.

@mstormi Well I have been using OH2 and Alexa for like 6 years now and it does break from time to time. Sometimes its not the software thats break, like PSU or SD card. In those cases you can not simply ask someone to reset the power,debug or change it. For some strange reason it always break at the worse time!. For instance I had OH run for 462 days and out of blue the Netatmo binding stopped working, and I couldnt restart OH from remote and I was away for a few days so ventilation had to be used manually for that time. Therefor it would be nice to have a gateway that both alexa and OH compatible. If no such gateway exist, which gateway do you recommend to get for OH?

Move on to something better than a Raspberry Pi then. Those are hardware issues unrelated to OH.

This is really an XY problem: you are asking how to build a secondary gateway but you don’t really want another gateway. What you want is availability.

These are modular hardware components you should be having spares for on site.

That is the point why the openHABian features I mentioned are built the way they are:
anyone who is on site, even your grandma, can replace them.
The 2nd SD card is a mirror of the internal one so they need not touch anything in software and neither do you.

Booting from a software/config state that is known to work will resurrect your home
(assuming you have a proper working initialization rule run on startup).

The alternative, which you still are looking at, is to double everything plus add a great bunch of new hw and code to handle additional complexity: more expensive, way more efforts, and still less reliability in total.

You need to have spares of everything. For non RPi, this is getting expensive quickly.

And thing is, it won’t work to simply replace them by spare components because you have to install/reinitialize the spare (at least physically move the disk).
That will not work if you’re not on site yourself.

Again, this is right the use case openHABian is built to overcome.

Hmm, I thought there were wifi to zwave gateway that both alexa and openhab could connect to at the same time.

Btw I do have extra RPI and SD card at hand, but it still hard to get grandma to open the fusebox and locate RPI inside and get her to look for the power light to see if its PSU thats broken, then to get her glasses out to locate the tiny SD card, and get her to orient the new one correctly, and changing the RPI is a no go since then its needs to be reoved from its case, and also the gpi header needs to be moved over… So I find it hard to get someone completely unfamiliar with the system to do some debugging either hardware or software…

And to be honest it is fairly stable when it runs for like 2 years before sth fails…

Since I need to get a gateway I thought I should ask for advice on the forum here since I just got the Zwave dimmers and have never used those before. So any tip regarding which zwave gateway to get would be awesome.

First, there are different zwave controllers for different regions in the world so tell us where you live for suggestions

Is this stick available from Digikey the one you are referring to?
Also available here from Mouser

here is a link to the thread this came from (which you may be interested in reading)

Norway :slight_smile:

1 Like

seems like smarthings gateway will work both with alexa and openhab, maybe some other producers aswell