Oh the joy of pairing

[Trexx]

I have been having to manually delete the dongle.restore file

[rafale77]

Could you maybe try downgrading the firmware and trying this again? I thought I tested 4955 but maybe not. It doesn't look like a compatibility issue from the dongle itselfl but more likely a change in how the firmware triggers a dongle restore. The other possibility is the translation from one SDK from the other is not working because... you already upgraded your uzb firmware. If that is the case though, you could downgrade the UZB firmware back, do the restore and then re-upgrade it. The restore works better with an SDK the vera knows. In truth I have actually transitioned my vera to an external usb stick a long time back, though it was not an uzb so when I did this, I actually moved from a silabs usb stick to a zwave-me uzb all on the vera. Others have done this though (@DesT for example).

I am baffled because when it is an sdk failure, it still goes and triggers the dongle.restore.go file. Maybe try to do a "touch dongle.restore.go" and run a luup reload instead?

[Trexx]

@rafale77 Which Vera FW version are you thinking and do you have a link to it

Which zwave-me version would I need to be on to to test that portion?

[rafale77]

I think one version back of the UZB should suffice. Probably 5.36 or 5.32 but I was more thinking about downgrading the vera.

[Trexx]

I was able to piece together the URL structure to download the mt621 versions of 7.31 (current), 7.30 & 7.29. Which do you want to target.

[rafale77]

7.29 should work.

[Trexx]

Tried 7.29, reset to factory, restore backup config w/zwave. All came up good, failed on dongle.restore (luup) phase. Tried doing a touch "dongle.restore.go" and reboot even.. no go.

[rafale77]

This is really very strange. And I suppose the file you created is still there? There must be something else going on. It seems like your luup engine is not even trying to do the dongle restore.

[Trexx]

Yup... file still there.

[rafale77]

Last resort is to downgrade the Uzb stick as well but this is rather bizarre. Something must be blocking. I just can't figure out what.

I just realized I have been seeing your posts on the QNAP forum.

[Trexx]

To which version of UZB are you thinking? And yes I have been on the QNAP forums for many years

[rafale77]

just one prior. 5.35 or 5.36 I believe?

[Trexx]

At this point it isn't worth the headache and time to potentially solve this. The "all" access token which used to work on v3.06 to be able to access via the gui the firmware downgrade option doesn't work anymore. I initially thought it was related to upgrading to v3.10 of SmartHome so I rolled back, but still it didn't work. Looks like they shut that one down.

[Trexx]

I think I figured out part of my problem... in looking closer at the controller information in SmartHome app, it looks like I got an EU version instead of a US version of the dongle so it was on the wrong frequencies. I am sending it back to Amazon and re-ordered the chip off of your recommended eBay seller.

[rafale77]

hmm interesting and weird... You know you can recode the dongle to US frequency right? I am just not sure if the embedded antenna was calibrated properly for it. The difference is in the number of channels and how they are optimized for their specific frequencies. The US use only two channels while 3 are used in other regions.

[Trexx]

I was having issues where using OZWD I would try and add a node (inclusion) and it wouldn't register the device even if was almost on top of it.. so that eventually led me there.

I looked on the sticker on the dongle which claims it is the US version (ZMEUUZB1).

In Z-way app, it shows EU and only options that appear to be for the ZMEEUZB version (EU) dongle for changing frequency.

I tried changing frequency via shell script to US, which says it does, but Z-way still showed EU even after that.

[Trexx]

I received the new USB dongle from e-bay seller. Shows US frequency in Zwave SW (5.27 release) and connected into OZWD in Home Assistant fine. Was able to successfully pair a Fibaro Dongle with it (which I couldn't get anything to pair with old dongle). So I think we have a winner

[rafale77]

Congrats! Cheers.

[cubs2b23]

Looks like I'm running into the same things @Trexx in migrating things over from the Vera. Stuck at the dongle.restore not being removed upon engine reload. I'm not sure if I saw if there was a resolution.

[rafale77]

My wild guess is that there is a problem with the SDK version between the vera and the uzb. When I did this, my uzb was running version 6.81.05, the same version I was running on the vera, so I had no problems at all. The latest uzb firmware runs on 6.82.01. The vera also officially only supported 6.81.01 so I was already being very adventurous.
My advice would be to check what SDK your vera is running and then downgrade your uzb to a firmware version supporting this same SDK so that the zwave serial API program on the vera doesn't need to do an SDK translation. There are so many people who did this, including on the HA forum that if it isn't working anymore, probably something changed on the vera which I am not aware of.