Just bought a few items. Any HomeAssistant configuration gotchas?

I just stumbled on these devices and found the community/support side to be great. Not to mention the features on the switches/dimmers look very promising. So I ended up buying 5 (red) dimmers and a (red) switch. I use homeassistant. Is there any preparation that I should take? The wiring is already set up properly, I’m more or less wondering about the (home assistant) configuration side. I’ve seen posts referencing OZW being out of date and not gaining all functionality upon install. Is there a up-to-date thread I can read up on that covers all the gotchas?

Also, What is the typical lead time for these devices? Placed the order today and I can’t find the ‘expected delivery’ anywhere in the emails or on the confirmation page. Building a bonus room and I’m going to be putting up the insulation and drywall in the next 2 weeks. My goal is to have the room finished by march, will I have the devices in time?

Home assistant currently uses OpwnZwave version 1.4, which is no longer supported. Basic functions generally work out of the box, but for working configuration or scenes, some additional work is needed.

  1. Download the most recent OpenZwave 1.4 config files from github. This post has general information on how to do it.
  2. Configure the Zwave config_path in HA to use the zwave config directory downloaded from github. Link
  3. Manually edit the manufacturer_specific.xml file to add the missing Inovelli devices (they have not been added to the main github repo yet), and add the missing xml files to the config/inovelli folder. Link
  4. Once your devices have been added and are using the latest config files, you will need to stop HA and edit your zwcfg*.xml file and add some information to get working scenes (OZW 1.4 does not natively support scenes). Link

Eventually, HA will move to OZW 1.6, which should make things easier. OZW 1.6 supports automatic downloads of config files, and has native scene support.

As far as lead time on orders, it probably depends on your location, quantity, and type of order. My most recent order was placed on 1/28/2020. It shipped on 1/29/2020 from Michigan, and arrived at my house in Oregon on 2/1/2020.

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I second @jtronicus, I’ve placed 5 orders and all have shipped next business day and arrived, Michigan to Denver, in a couple of days. The inovelli crew are fast!

Thanks for the response. Seems pretty straightforward.

I can’t wait for the new zwave system to be implemented. From what I understand, @fishwaldo (creater of OZW) is working on a new contained solution that can be implemented as a stand alone docker container. When this happens, OZW won’t be so tightly wound into HomeAssistant and it will be able to keep up with the current releases of OZW.

EDIT: From what I remember, that’s slated for Q1/Q2 of this year.

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Noticing this thread was somewhat stale, I wanted to update folks as a new user of OZW Admin running OZW 1.6 with HA 0.117.1:

You can easily test OZW Beta in Home Assistant by following these steps.

Having done so, I can now access all my nodes in the standalone OZWadmin desktop app for Mac or your desired OS, rather than the very finnicky web GUI. Be sure to set the OZW Admin port to 1893 in the add-on configuration (save & restart). Then, just specify the network IP address of your HA device on the OZW Admin port 1893 and it loads great!

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Port is 1983, might want to correct your post.

Also, mine is running on HA but in a VNC server and I can’t get it to connect. It is localhost:1983 for the daemon and I tried the ip of HA with the 1983 and it isn’t connecting.

Anyone have any thoughts?

Edit: Figured it out, it’s in the configuration of the add-on under Network:

Was previously set as blank or “disabled”.

Seems like your vnc isn’t properly set up if it’s not hosting to port 1983.

Got it figured out, see edit above.