As you may already know, I'm heavily invested in Zwave (70+ devices at the main house, 40 in the beach one), curious towards Shelly Wifi (4-5 devices added when using Vera, that I'll eventually ditch for Zwave) and slowly starting interest in ZigBee.

I find Zwave life after Vera to be definitely better and the mesh still more stable than Zigbee or WiFi.

I've started a new journey to learn more about Matter and I've recently started working on a matterbridge plugin to call HTTP endpoints as in the old ha-bridge days. Problem is, while Matter may seems a standard, vendors have their own preferences over implementation, with the result that support is not complete and you'll see ridiculous constraints, such as no more than 20 matter devices supported on your Alexa network.

We'll see, I avoided tuya because of cloud links and the only cloud-only things I have are my Nest thermostats, bought when I was thinking that it will eventually become less important, because they were the only thermostats that were good to show. Today, I'll not buy them.

All that said, my older Zwave devices are 10 years old and apart 2-3 I had to replace because of relay that stops working, all is good and mesh is stable as it has never been, thanks to ZWA-2.

if you connect to HAOS VM, there's no need to install Zigbee2MQTT.

This should be recognized by HAOS as well. Otherwise, map the USB to your Zigbee2MQTT VM/Docker image and you're good to go. Remember to get an USB cable, so the radio is not near the internal USB port - that's better in terms of radio.

@CatmanV2 yes. you could use it directly or via Zigbee2MQTT, as I did (because I wanted to fiddle around).

Home Assistant

Home Assistant Connect ZBT-2

The easiest way to start with Zigbee or Thread is now even better.

I have this Home Assistant ZBT-2 in one house, and SONOFF ZBDongle-E in another and both are working OK with Zigbee2MQTT. Mostly plug&play (just the setup is not very straightforward - but manageable), definitely good after setup.

yes, fine on my Mac and on iOS 26 as well.

Well, taking a backup inside ZWaveJS is a breeze - and yes, it's very easy to backup (or restore) the NVM on the ZWA-2. In fact, I just restored a backup from UZB to ZWA-2 and I was good to go.

I think you'll never need to move it around the house, because the antenna is huge. No problems in pairing devices either, but that was the case with UZB before and I think it's a ZWave JS prerogative in general. It was just plug&play for me, but I understand that if you have to change your logic to match new device IDs it may make sense to start from scratch - time permitting.

@toggledbits are external Zwave controllers supported via USB? that could be another route, as in the old Vera days.

@tunnus I see there's a beta for C8. The point is to just take a NVM backup in the format supported by ZwaveJS. after that, it's a breeze to restore it on a new controller, if you have a minimum SDK/fw version, as mentioned in the ZWA release notes.
It's wort a try, if you have lots of Zwave devices and unpair/repair them is out of question for you.
I'm still on my original ZWave network I built in a previous house 10+ years ago - and that's a testament to the enormous flexibility that Zwave offered me in the last decade.

@tunnus if you could install ZwaveJS on your c8, just backup the nvm, take the file and restore it on your final controller. Easier than you’d think. Secondary controllers promoted to primary are always a mess in my experience.

After all these years, no NAK/CAN is a joy to see

yep, parameters for reactions will definitely improve my job here, specially when speaking of thermostats/HVAC in general. Thanks as always for your support, Patrick!

That's one case:

I want to send the ON/OFF command again, until every device in the group is ON/OFF. I have a count just to avoid an infinite loop.

It works, but it's not ideal to send a command to a device already on (or off) - because I want to avoid unnecessary traffic. There's no way to filter the group devices. I know I could write a script and do it, but the point here is to avoid a script if possible.

devices_status = false,
counter = counter + 1,
finalStatus = true,

each id in getEntity('groups>ac_casa1').attributes.sys_group.members: do
  v = bool(getEntity( id )?.attributes?.power_switch?.state),
  #print("!!!!!!DEBUG" + getEntity( id ).name + " - " + v + " - " + devices_status + " - " + finalStatus),
  devices_status = (v == finalStatus) && devices_status
done

EDIT: also, there's no way to delay in code, so I need 2 scripts anyway, to send on/off and then set the mode. Thanks.

yes. I know about DynamicGroupsController and I'm using it in other situations (dead zwave devices, battery low, etc). Problem is that this list is dynamic, ie based on other external conditions (are guest over? is christmas? etc). I tried, but I'm back at code, unfortunately.

EDIT: anyway, if I want to send the command, let's say, only to on devices in a group, I have to use code. Correct me if I'm wrong, unless I create two separated groups (one with on and one with off devices), but this seems messy.

I have a couple of situation where I'm using code to iterate over an array (ie: climate entities, lights) to operate them in group, and repeat until every one has done what it needs to do.

It will be very cool to have a For Each command that could iterate visually on the array, so I could continue to define it visually. Pseudo UI, so it's easier to explain:

I'm ok with devices being of type Entity[], loaded via a script block, or with Dynamic Groups (but, in my specific case, this list is know at runtime only).

I know it's not trivial, but one may dream Thanks @toggledbits !

@toggledbits nope. Unfortunately, the problems on one of my system I mentioned in my DMs are still there. It's better for sure, but I have lots of timeout while in VPN.

It's probably related to the network in general, but since it's a beach house, I'll try to resolve it at spring time. I'll probably invest in some better network gear and call it a day. My problems are quite similar, but my main obstacle is the structure load, that goes in timeout and forces me to reload the page until it loads.

@gwp1 I think you could just rename it

I started with Vera Edge, then Plus, and eventually moved my Z-Wave network to Z-Wave.me UZB. Recently, I wanted to experiment with Z-Wave Long Range, so I needed a new controller. I had Home Assistant Connect ZWA-2 on my radar for a while, and I pulled the trigger thanks to Black Friday offers. It was the least complicated migration ever: back up the old, unplug it, stop ZWaveJS, plug in the new controller, and restore the backup—done in a breeze.

I let the mesh adapt for a couple of days, and the result is impressive: 80% of my devices are now reporting directly to the controller. The Z-Wave network feels crazy fast. My setup includes about 70 devices, and I struggled a lot with Vera. I had missing reports on UZB as well, even if sporadic. In the first days of use, this new setup seems definitely better, and its range is phenomenal. More on that later.

Since I was at it, I moved my ZigBee network from Hue Bridge (only lights) to Home Assistant Connect ZBT-2 and ZigBee2MQTT, because I wanted to add more ZigBee devices to my network. It seems that all the little weird devices are ZigBee now—I bought a couple of temp/humidity sensors and a ThirdReality Night Light. I'm using it to turn red if the alarm is armed, and as a white night light in the hallway when not armed: very nice to automate with Reactor via Home Assistant.

The ZigBee mesh is still small at 10 devices, but it will eventually improve.

Here's a pic of the two antennas: ZWA-2 on the left, ZBT-2 in the center, and a 33cl bottle of water on the right for comparison.

The ZWA-2 is huge. No wonder it's able to span across three floors and reach the garden with no hops. Mind you, my house is concrete and glass, so not the best in terms of signal. Highly recommended if you want a very powerful Z-Wave antenna, with support for Long Range as well.

so:

alarm(10), true

should fire every 10 secs? It's not working for me, maybe I have something wrong in the expression.

EDIT: ok, setting it as pulsing every X secs indefinitely did the trick. amazing!

Sorry to write here without trying, but I’m flying today.

Am I correct if i say that script action with alarm() makes it possible to execute a reaction in a given interval, lets say 15 seconds or 3.5 minutes?

That sounds amazing, since I’ve used weird tricks, including a custom controller, just to do this.

Oh, I have a the medium one at our beach house and I like it. The xl is another league, but the medium one is the perfect one for cozy rooms.