No, I left it powered up. I didn't wan to mess with having to put the system in test and take the battery out of the panel.
I'm wondering if that could have contributed to the issue
Still having issues. After including the devices they are not responding to commands and the repair feature on the hub is saying the nodes are failed. Seems the hub is struggling with range.
So I went ahead and bought this last night after all the frustration: "Zooz 700 Series Z-Wave Plus S2 USB Stick ZST10 700" and checked it out with home assitant on my Pi about an hour ago after Amazon dropped it off. After excluding the switches, I was able to pick them all up right away. here is the kicker; the hub is sitting right next to my Pi with the usb stick sitting on the same shelf in my media closet. The weird thing is, Hubitat was reporting 33db for one switch and 3db for the other. I haven't bothered to look at the signal levels in home assistant yet. I just know that I have been able to send commands without issue or delay on the usb stick whereas the hubitat hub had a delay when it was working and then the nodes failed. I'm going to assume that this is a design issue and the hubitat hub has poor range. Z-wave devices should be able to do 100+ft on a single hop depending on environment. I'm pretty disappointed.
Not entirely ready to give up on this $100 purchase. I have tried again to get the mesh set up. I included each switch by moving the hub within 5 feet of them and then moved the hub back to my closet. This is where I am after letting it sit over night.
Neither switch are responding to manual commands. I'm done wasting my time on this.
Looking around the forums and reviews, seems like I'm not the only one with range issues compared to other z-wave hubs and sticks. The range is really limited on this hub. The consensus seems to be I need to have repeaters within 5 feet of the hub in order to get it to work. This is pathetic IMHO. I'm frustrated, if this is how it's going to be then I guess I'll put it up back up on E-bay (I bought it open box from a person who also gave up on it).
0x06 hasn’t completed its pairing, might be best to remove it and re-pair it
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Good catch...
@SergeantSeven - you could try hitting Refresh on on the device several times first to see if that helps it finish up.
Repeaters near the hub are usually not necessary unless locks are involved. I have a 5600 sqft house running on an off the shelf c7 with around 50 z-wave devices (including 3 schlage locks) and have no issues. Others have close to 200... @bobbyD anything in his engineering logs?
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There wouldn't be anything in the engineering logs, as the radio and the hub are working properly. Those logs are useful when either the radio isn't working (accompanied by radio offline alerts), or the hub is not working properly (accompanied by various alert messages). Other than that Logs have more meaningful data than what engineering logs might reveal.
Maybe the person who sold it did so because there’s something wrong with that individual unit?
Do you know if the internal antenna in your unit is attached ok, or not otherwise damaged?
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I wouldn't know without opening it up. Is there any easy way to open it and check? Is the antenna on these printed on the PCB or is it a separate antenna with a connector? I'm willing to check...
It was completed and had an OK status at one point. then it stopped responding and I tried to do a repair. after the repair completed that's the status it had, I've tried to refresh as well. Also for some odd reason. the back patio switch is routing through the front porch switch even though the hub is closer to the back patio than the front porch switch is. This confirms to me that its a range issue. The front porch switch can see the back patio switch better than the hub can and those switches are about 100ft apart on opposite sides of the house.
This.
Here's a few pics.
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As someone who make a living designing circuit boards, I'm left wondering why Hubitat won't go with a better antenna design. Obviously to me, there is a huge variation in quality among Hubs. Lots of people complaining about the range sucking the life out of them and others saying they "don't know what the hell anyone's talking about, everything's perfect..."
Obviously there is an issue or we wouldn't be here asking for help. Z-wave is supposed to be easy, and it usually is with other controllers. I'm going to open it up and take a look and see if something is wrong with the antenna.
There are 4 sticky pads on the bottom. Underneath those are 4 phillips screws. Take those out and the two halves of the shell come apart. The antennas are attached to the lid and the motherboard sandwiches between the two halves of the shell. There are two radios and two antennas. The one closest to the ethernet port is the zigbee radio and the other is the zwave radio.
The center pin of the antenna and one ground should be soldered. Factory solder jobs are pretty heavy on the solder but should look pretty tidy. The solder is lead free solder so you need pretty high temps to remove it cleanly. If the hub was messed with in any way it will probably be pretty apparent as most people are pretty bad at soldering small components.
Post some pics of the antenna solder joints and we can tell pretty easily if that is the issue. Try to zoom in as close as you can to the center pin specifically. A small batch of the early models had issues with the center pin breaking as well as very fragile usb ports.
If there is a soldering issue or antenna issue I can repair it pretty easily. Even upgrade it to externals if you want just cover shipping and parts. I can even send you a shipping label too to save some time.
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I appreciate the offer, but I can take care of any repairs myself. I design and assembly circuit boards for rapid prototyping, I have hot air rework and reflow equipment and I'm not to shabby with an iron. All I use is lead free so that won't be too difficult for me. I'll pop it open but I'm willing to bet money I don't find anything. I have a decision to make though, do I want to keep tinkering with Hubitat or keep the Zooz USB stick and just go full HA running on the Pi3 that I already have running for my Vivint integration right now. I don't use Zigbee so I am less concerned about that capability. I have 3 more switches waiting to be installed but none of them are going to be any closer to the hub unfortunately.
Np, you should be good to go then. It's pretty easy to repair if you know what you're doing. The range on stock antennas isn't great but definitely shouldn't be anything like what you're seeing. WIth externals, I'm pretty much direct to everything minus a few switches hiding behind a fireplace. HA is pretty fun but it also takes a lot more tinkering to keep everything happy. I think once you get the antenna bit sorted you'll be good.
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Here are pics of the solder jobs on the antennas. that one seems a little sketchy but maybe its not that bad? maybe it worth moving the center conductor over a tad?
Yea or at least reflow the solder so the center pin wire is in it instead of on top of it. I can't zoom in enough to see if the pads are bridged but might want to soak up a bit of that solder too just to make sure. Like I mentioned before they go heavy on the solder on these so that might be the case here.
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