Finally gave up on my Ezlo Plus
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The promise of "all available devices will be supported" gave me hope for including more Zigbee devices into to my home as Vera was not a good option for Zigbee devices.
Despite the support for new devices is extremely slow, the implementation of Zigbee has a lot to wish for and it seems a low priority at Ezlo I managed to include 22 of my 23 Zigbee devices as generic. But after 2 years of devices still missing attributes and randomly/every controller reboot loosing connection to the controller and had to be power cycled to connect again, and some even dropping off the network completely without any reason, I decided to give up.
The positive outcome of all this:
I bought a Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus and installed Zigbee2MQTT and never been happier.
Suddenly the pairing were no pain and took a few seconds per device, all my devices were recognized, all capabilities of the devices were exposed and it never misses a signal to/from a device ever.I'm surprised how stable and configurable my new setup is. I can set device parameters, offsets, send messages handled by the bulbs them self like effects, broadcast for groups, transition time for power on/off. I can handle debounce for MQTT messages, do OTA firmware update on devices and much more! Most of this is probably standard for the common branded hubs like Hue etc but I never had one so this is new to me.
A big plus for me is the MQTT part of Zigbee2MQTT as I'm migrating as much as possible to MQTT.My Ezlo Plus is now serving as a modified WiFi access point to my network and only have the VistaCam 1203 Doorbell still connected for evaluation. Time will tell if I ever move my Z-wave devices to it.
Conclusion:
I could really recommend both the Sonoff 3.0 USB Dongle Plus and Zigbee2MQTT to anyone going the same path! -
toggledbitsreplied to Crille on Nov 2, 2022, 2:33 PM last edited by toggledbits Nov 2, 2022, 10:34 AM
@crille said in Finally gave up on my Ezlo Plus:
But after 2 years of devices still missing attributes and randomly/every controller reboot loosing connection to the controller and had to be power cycled to connect again, and some even dropping off the network completely without any reason, I decided to give up.
I'll point out here that although you may have been trying to be successful for two years, the manufacturer of that device has been at it over four years now, and still hasn't produced a device that is on parity with that which it aspires to replace in many aspects that are too important to ignore. Were I an investor in or owner of such a business, I would say the opportunity has been missed, the good will that the acquired community held for the device family has been lost (and a likely significant percentage have moved on to alternatives), and further effort at this point is throwing good money after bad. If making good revenue is the business goal, IMO there is money to be made in making good endpoint devices (and selling 10x or 100x as many with less support), but not so much in hubs. Captain Ahab should admit the whale has beaten him and move on to fishing the plentiful seas of the smaller-tailed beasts.
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I'm amazed that they are still running!
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Not surprised by any of this, of course, but pleased to hear of your success with the Zigbee dongle and MQTT. Thanks for the useful feedback.
Homebridge is now, essentially, my hub, but with openLuup providing some of the automation. My dear old VeraLite soldiers on supporting just two electric power meters for import and PV generation (and it does manage to cope well with just that.)
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I'm still using my VeraPlus for Zwave, because migrating Zwave is boring and I still have more exciting things to do (and it never worked so beautifully as with only Zwave duties via MSR), but I'm not surprised at all, because from my experience (I stopped testing one year ago) this new controller is DOA. Too little, too late, and a wonderful community thrown under the bus with nothing in exchange.
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@therealdb well we got this place....
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Agreed! I would say this seems more functional because 'we' are the masters of our own destiny. And Melih isn't constantly trying to tell us why you, and the other skilled ones, are wrong.....
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Other products like Home Assistant, MSR, Hubitat have made much forward progress in the time it's taken the new owners of Vera (where I got my home automation start) nowhere if not backward.
It's a shame. I am, however, over it and quite happy with current configurations.
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I gave up on the Ezlo Plus within a week or two of use... I followed the updates closely and they were still fixing so many basic issues that I never bothered to plug it back in.
Recently completely ditched my Vera Plus as well and was a bit bitter sweet, but I am much much happier with Home Assistant. Weirdly enough, some Z wave issues I experienced with my VP I am still experiencing with HA but I can live with it.
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Those of you on HA with Z-Wave, you might consider adding ZWaveJSController to your Reactor configuration. While it seems redundant at first, HA hides a lot of detail and functionality in its integration that I can expose and use by directly talking to ZWave-JS in Reactor. And it doesn't interfere with the HA integration with ZWave-JS, it operates in parallel with it. There is a lot of device support I have yet to provide (I don't and can't own every device to test myself), but it has mechanisms now (as do all controllers as of a couple of builds ago) where you can just download and place a ZIP file to enhance or correct device support, no "forklift upgrades".
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@toggledbits I use ZWaveJsUI (Formerly known as ZWaveJs2MQTT) will it still work correctly? Is the main purpose of the Reactor Z wave controller just to expose some extra actions, capabilities, attributes etc? I haven’t run into any missing Z wave actions yet but good to know for the future.
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toggledbitsreplied to Pabla on Nov 2, 2022, 7:55 PM last edited by toggledbits Nov 2, 2022, 4:15 PM
@pabla said in Finally gave up on my Ezlo Plus:
I use ZWaveJsUI (Formerly known as ZWaveJs2MQTT) will it still work correctly?
That's exactly what it uses.
@pabla said in Finally gave up on my Ezlo Plus:
Is the main purpose of the Reactor Z wave controller just to expose some extra actions, capabilities, attributes etc?
The goal was to create a native ZWave integration, so you could run Reactor as a ZWave hub without HA, Hubitat, Vera, etc. As such, it needs to access and expose everything. I will be doing the same for ZigBee at some point.
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Still reading the forum, but mainly busy with serious reconstruction work on the house (bathroom and two rooms to go). Once that dust settles I am sure I will be more active again. Ezlo is powerd off, Hubitat slowly taking over (has its own short comings, but zwave does not seem one of them). MSR provides a key function to make that transfer simpler. openLuup still key in keeping it all running.
Keep up the good work.Cheers Rene
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With regret, my three Vera controllers (VeraSecure and VeraPlus) are now in a cupboard. It's been such a shame to see the support for vera drop to impossible from being able to get someone on the phone straight away over the years. A firmware update (official) killed one of them and support didnt replace it. EZLO secure never came to the UK.
I've been with vera since vera3 and had a LOT of automations in PLEG and Reactor on that platform.
Updates were few, and the hugely contributing people on the forums telling Vera/Ezlo support how to fix things often got banned when they raised concerns.They had so much good potential and reasonably decent hardware in itself. I moved everything (60 z wave devices) and my alarm panel and weather station all into HA. It's been a pain, but with MSR at least I have some familiarity and less MASSIVE pains including devices like you get with over 50 or less on the Vera. At least in ZwaveJS when something goes wrong, its easy to check logs and reinterview/delete entities that aren't valid and sort it, without the exclude/include everytime (sometimes many times per device) on the other platform.
z stick on Pi with HA has less range and more tedious backup methods, and not as tidy package on the shelf, but at least its progressive.
And i'm able to update the z wave devices OTA without excluding and including into a different network to do it as a bonus. -
I still have the "prototype" Ezlo plus in a box somewhere, any chance of "nuking" it like the Vera Plus? Zigbee and Z-wave 700 chip could be useful..
@toggledbits, the only reason I use Z-wave JS UI into HASS is that i use the HASS visualization on phones and UI panels, that would have to be replaced by helpers/virtuals if I were to take it into MSR instead?
I could offcourse feed both MSR and HASS from JS UI, but that seems like a bit of a waste of bandwidth? dunno.. -
@perh UI stuff is big on my mind these days...
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@perh said in Finally gave up on my Ezlo Plus:
I still have the "prototype" Ezlo plus in a box somewhere, any chance of "nuking" it like the Vera Plus? Zigbee and Z-wave 700 chip could be useful..
...same for me. Never plugged it in, but interested in possibilities. I recall, though, that the hardware is bottom of the range, so perhaps not worth the hassle? I do still have an unused Vera Edge as a backup if necessary.
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It's about equivalent to an RPi 4, but with only 512MB RAM. That's more limiting than anything. I've run Reactor on it. It works. Not something you'd really want to do, but doable. I wonder if ZWave-JS would run on it and see the chip... I haven't tried that yet...
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In other words, you stopped and deleted the Ezlo SW? In that case, installing ser2net should be a breeze? It would be cool to try running JS UI on it, I'd give it a go if you show me the door in.
10/27
