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[tamorgen]

Good morning all,
I've got a stable Home Assistant running on a RPI 4 with a Aeotec Z-Stick 7 Plus, and of course the Z-wave JS integration. I've manually moved a handful of devices, and I'm overall much happier with the HA z-wave capability than I am with Vera. There are still some things I'm trying to figure out that I have in Vera that I'm not sure how they'll work in HA, but no deal breakers.

I've got all of my automation on MSR and off of luup Reactor, so really the only thing left for me is to migrate my Z-wave network. I saw @rafale77's post about using a Zwave.me UZB1 to Zway, but of course that's not what I'm using.

Is there a similar method that I can use my Aeotec Z-Stick 7 plus to Home Assistant? I have around 70 Z-wave devices (give or take devices that generate multiple instances in Vera), so manual unpairing, including, etc, would be quite a chore.

[Pabla]

@tamorgen you’d be better off starting from scratch and manually repairing each device. It will be better in the long run since you can build the mesh network out, starting from devices closest to your Z wave stick and working outwards.

Plus this removes any chances of any weird Vera Z wave related issues from occurring with your new setup. I did it with my 50 ish devices and it only was a few hours or work.

Ps. I’d use the Z Wave2MQTT (Now called ZWaveJS UI) instead of the ZWaveJS add on. The UI add on has a lot more granular control over your network.

[tamorgen]

@pabla, that's something I had considered. I know there is some weirdness in some of my Z-wave devices in Vera, because they were included as General Z-wave device and not a specific device creation.

Should be a fun few days...

[therealdb]

In theory you should be able to clone the zwave chip if the stick is recognized by your Vera. There's plenty of documentation about that.
After cloning you should be able to interview the devices again, so it should not matter how your Vera mapped these in the first place.

[tamorgen]

@therealdb

I just ended it doing it from scratch. It only took a few hours to go from room to room, exclude, include, etc. Home Assistant includes devices much faster than Vera. The biggest headache was waiting for Vera to reload itself every time I removed a node, that and moving both Vera and Home Assistant from room to room, plugging in, and waiting for them to boot up.

The other headache I ended up dealing with some of my battery powered devices. More specifically, I had problems with my iBlinds motors. I could connect to them fine when my Home Assistant RPI was in the room, but the minute I put the RPI back in it's home, which is the same location Vera was in before, I lost all communication with those devices. I spent the better part of yesterday fighting this.

I let Home Assistant heal the mesh last night, and tried again this morning. They still were being listed as "dead". I started digging a bit more into the HA community forums, and I came across a post that said that plugging the Zwave stick directly into the USB port is a known problem, and that there can be interference from the Pi board itself. I found an old USB extension cable, and moved it about 3 feet away, and magically everything joined back up!

At this point, I've pretty much migrated off of Vera. It's kind of bittersweet. Vera worked pretty well when I started off years ago, but the lack of development from Vera, together with the instability of their servers, and the lack of forward momentum on the Ezlo front put me fully in the Home Assistant camp. Thankfully MSR has made that shift much easier, since I was able to use my same rules from Vera and use them for my new HA.

[akbooer]

@tamorgen said in Another Vera --> Home Assistant migration question:

The biggest headache was waiting for Vera to reload itself every time I removed a node

I've just removed a bunch of devices from an old VeraLite, running UI5. On that system, at least, it allowed you to select the option to remove multiple devices before rebooting. But too late now!!

@tamorgen said in Another Vera --> Home Assistant migration question:

At this point, I've pretty much migrated off of Vera. It's kind of bittersweet.

Yes, absolutely. Feeling the same thing here, been running with them (or, rather, falling over) for around a decade. My current configuration is as described here.

The only thing left on Vera is now electricity meter readers, and I simply can't find any suitable WiFi replacement. Have applied for a smart meter installation and hoping that I can get ethernet access to the Consumer Device Interface.

[RogerO]

Today I moved my last device from Vera to HomeAssistant. I do have mixed feelings about it. For all it's flaws and performance issues, it had a very easy interface to get started in and for the average person, could do most of what they needed. Started using PLEG but never got very far with it since I had to spend hours relearning it every time I wanted to add a new automation. Reactor was a breath of fresh air for the Vera and I am eternally grateful for all the assistant I have received from Patrick over the years including some beta code for my Leviton scene controllers and my Venstar thermostat. MSR allowed me to tie my Vera and Home Assistant together while I slowly migrated off Vera and had way more capabilities than I could ever master.

As I get older, my wife keeps telling me that if I die she is selling the house because she cannot run it. That has given me some incentive to simplify my environment so I have gone to only Home Assistant. Would have stayed with MSR if I could have figured out how to get the addon to work in HA, but in the end was easier to move everything to HA and eliminated one more component.
Thanks to all the people that have offered assistance on this community as well as the old Vera forum before EZLO.

Roger

Have a nice Vera Plus available if anyone is interested. In the Seattle area but will ship. Make me an offer.