Z-Wave

The first time you enable the Z-Wave component it will install the Z-Wave drivers (python-openzwave). This can take up to half an hour on slow machines like Raspberry Pi.

Installing the drivers might require some extra packages to be installed. Check your platform below.

Platform specific installation instructions

Linux (except Hass.io)

On Linux platforms (other than Hass.io) there is one dependency you will need to have installed ahead of time (included in systemd-devel on Fedora/RHEL systems):

$ sudo apt-get install libudev-dev

On Python 3.6 you may also have to install libpython3.6-dev, and possibly python3.6-dev.

macOS

When installing on macOS you may have to also run the command below ahead of time, replace “x.x” with the version of Python ($ python3 --version) you have installed.

$ sudo /Applications/Python\ x.x/Install\ Certificates.command

Raspberry Pi

On Raspberry Pi you will need to enable the serial interface in the raspi-config tool before you can add Z-Wave to Home Assistant.

Configuration

# Example configuration.yaml entry
zwave:
  usb_path: /dev/ttyACM0

Finding the controller path on Linux

If you’re using Hass.io please follow these setup instructions for finding the controller path.

To find the path of your Z-Wave USB stick or module, connect it to your system and run:

$ ls -ltr /dev/tty*|tail -n 1

That will give you a line that looks something like this:

crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 204, 64 Sep 21 10:25 /dev/ttyUSB0

Where the date and time displayed is approximately the time you connected the USB stick or module (it may also be something like /dev/ttyAMA0 or /dev/ttyACM0). The number will be zero for the first device connected, and higher numbers for later devices.

Or, if there is no result, try to find detailed USB connection info with:

$ dmesg | grep USB

If Home Assistant (hass) runs with another user (e.g. homeassistant on Hassbian) give access to the stick with:

$ sudo usermod -a -G dialout homeassistant

The output from ls -ltr above contains the following information The device type is c (character special) and permissions are rw-rw----, meaning only the owner and group can read and write to it, there is only 1 link to the file, it is owned by root and can be accessed by the group dialout, it has a major device number of 204, and a minor device number of 64, the device was connected at 10:25 on 21 September, and the device is /dev/ttyUSB0.

Creating a Persistent Device Path

Depending on what’s plugged into your USB ports, the name found above may change. You can lock in a name, such as /dev/zwave, by following these instructions.

Finding the controller path on macOS

On macOS you can find the USB stick with:

$ ls /dev/cu.usbmodem*

Hass.io

To enable Z-Wave, plug your Z-Wave USB stick into your Raspberry Pi 3 and add the following to your configuration.yaml:

zwave:
  usb_path: /dev/ttyACM0

Depending on your Z-Wave device it may instead be /dev/ttyAMA0 (eg Razberry board) or /dev/ttyUSB0 (eg HUBUZB-1).

RancherOS

If you’re using RancherOS for containers, you’ll need to ensure you enable the kernel-extras service so that the USB_ACM module (also known as cdc_acm) is loaded:

$ sudo ros service enable kernel-extras
$ sudo ros service up kernel-extras

Network Key

Security Z-Wave devices require a network key before being added to the network using the Add Secure Node button in the Z-Wave Network Management card. You must set the network_key configuration variable to use a network key before adding these devices.

An easy script to generate a random key:

$ cat /dev/urandom | tr -dc '0-9A-F' | fold -w 32 | head -n 1 | sed -e 's/\(..\)/0x\1, /g' -e 's/, $//'

# Example configuration.yaml entry for network_key
zwave:
  network_key: "0x2e, 0xcc, 0xab, 0x1c, 0xa3, 0x7f, 0x0e, 0xb5, 0x70, 0x71, 0x2d, 0x98, 0x25, 0x43, 0xee, 0x0c"

Ensure you keep a backup of this key. If you have to rebuild your system and don’t have a backup of this key, you won’t be able to reconnect to any security devices. This may mean you have to do a factory reset on those devices, and your controller, before rebuilding your Z-Wave network.

First Run

The (compilation and) installation of python-openzwave happens when you first enable the Z-Wave component, and can take half an hour or more on a Raspberry Pi. When you upgrade Home Assistant and python-openzwave is also upgraded, this will also result in a delay while the new version is compiled and installed.

The first run after adding a device is when the zwave component will take time to initialize the entities, some entities may appear with incomplete names. Running a network heal may speed up this process.

Troubleshooting

Component could not be set up

Sometimes the device may not be accessible and you’ll get an error message upon startup about not being able to set up Z-Wave. Run the following command for your device path:

$ ls -l /dev/ttyAMA0

You should then see something like this:

crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 204, 64 Apr  1 12:34 /dev/ttyAMA0

The important pieces are the first piece crw-rw---- and the group dialout. If those are different then, for your device path, run:

$ sudo chgrp dialout /dev/ttyAMA0
$ sudo chmod g+rw /dev/ttyAMA0

Device path changes

If your device path changes when you restart, see this guide on fixing it.

Unable to install Python Openzwave

If you’re getting errors like:

openzwave-embed/open-zwave-master/libopenzwave.a: No such file or directory

Then the problem is that you’re missing libudev-dev, please install it.