blueman2

I did have an issue initially after re-synchronizing a battery powered door sensor (Gen 5). I removed it and brought it near my ISY to do the synchronize. Worked fine. I then walked to the back of my house and re-installed it. It would not communicate. I then put the device in awake mode, right clicked on the device in the ISY admin console, clicked "update neighbors", and after few seconds, it was communicating again. So it would appear the "update neighbors" does something. Just not sure what. I do think I had a Gen 3 device in the path and that might have been why the "update neighbors" was needed? In any case, I am very happy so far with 5.2.0.

I just completed my upgrade from 5.0.16C to 5.2.0. No issues at all. While doing a review of programs, I noticed 2 were yellow, indicating an issue. But both were phantom programs that I had deleted long ago that came back for some reason. I deleted and did a save. I also have done z-wave synchronize on all of my battery devices and most of my powered devices. No issues at all. A few "Basic" nodes were created, but I just put those in my 'Unused Devices' folder to keep things clean. None of my nodes needed to be fixed after doing the synchronize. They all came back just as they were, and retained their names and position in programs and scenes. Well done, Chris and Michel!

I am running mixed environment with about 1/2 300 generation devices and 1/2 500 generation. And even 1 700 generation. No problems with me. I did have to do a "update neighbors" on a couple devices, but that was about it. I now have a better z-wave mesh than ever after going to 500 series dongle.

Note that "update neighbors" is still there, which really is all the heal you need.

Actually, this was gone in 5.1 as well. I made a comment about that in the 5.1 thread. From what I have read, 500 series are self healing, so maybe this is no longer necessary in the post-300 series world?

I guess it depends on what problems you are having. 5.0.16C is working fine for me. There are no critical new features or device support in 5.2.0 from my perspective. I have about 80 insteon and 40 z-wave devices working fine. I probably will move to 5.2.0 because I can (I already have the 500 module installed), but would not be unhappy staying on 5.0.16C for the next 6-12 months.

Yes, I also had this happen several versions ago. Just add "Query All" back to the then statement. make sure program is still enabled to run at 3am.

@drprm1, if you made it to 5.1.0 on the series 300, then I recommend doing a z-wave backup (Z-wave => Tools => Backup), make sure it took (you will get a dialog box after a while saying backup success or backup failed). If it was successful, then do a regular ISY backup. That will give you everything you need to restore your working system. If the z-wave backup was not successful, try again and again until you get a good backup. You might need to disable any programs that query z-wave devices. So long as you have that good backup of the dongle and the ISY, then no need to worry about going backwards to 5.0.15 in my view. My issue was that I could not get a good backup of my Series 300, so when I tried to do a restore it erased my z-wave dongle but did not re-write it. So I ended up with a blank z-wave dongle which was not fun. My only warning is: DO NOT RESTORE A Z-WAVE DONGLE BACKUP MADE WHILE YOU WERE ON 5.0.16b OR 5.0.16C. In fact, just do not do a z-wave dongle restore at all right now until the next release from UDI.

As a heads up, if anyone is having troubles doing a z-wave dongle restore (Z-wave => Tools => Restore), I found that having active z-wave device queries can cause a restore to fail. So disable any programs that might automatically query a z-wave device while doing a restore. I had to do this to allow me to do a restore to my Series 500 dongle.

The 500 series does not have the external antenna. Only internal. Frankly, for me anyway, the external antenna never worked as well as the internal on the old 300 series, but YMMV. When you do go to 500 series, I just recommend you put the ISY into a vertical orientation (not flat on the table, but rather on it's side with z-wave module at top). For some reason, that helps a lot for the 500 series. And place a Gen 5 device/repeater within about 5-10 feet of the ISY so that it can be used to relay the ISY signal better. As for comparisons with the 300 series, that is becoming a moot point quickly as support for the 300 series appears to be going away pretty soon. I know it is a PITA to make the conversion, but I recommend doing it.

PSA for anyone still on 300 series dongle: I know this is perhaps more of a 500 vs 300 series dongle topic than a 5.1.X topic, but I think the two topics are related for anyone still on Series 300 z-wave dongles/controllers. I had tried multiple times in the past to move from the 300 controller to the 500 series controller, but each time it created a lot of problems in terms of communications with my z-wave devices, so each time I bravely retreated back to series 300. But now, after following the steps I outlined above, I am FINALLY seeing much more reliable communications using the 500 series dongle than the 300. Pretty much all my z-wave issues are gone now. My theory is that doing a re-sync of each device is what helped the most. From what I have read, all newer Gen 5 devices will go into legacy mode when they see a 300 series controller. When moving to the 500 series controller in the ISY, the devices need to be re-sync'ed in order to realize they can now go into Gen 5 mode. I had never done that before. Also, if you have any older (non-zwave+) devices in the chain of communications from the ISY to an end device, everything in that chain has to revert back to legacy mode so you lose all the benefits of Gen 5. So removing legacy z-wave devices as much as you can, especially if they are very close to the ISY, I think also helped me. Finally, once you are mostly using Gen 5 devices in your mesh, you can take advantage of the automatic routing used in Gen 5. Gen 5 remembers the last several successful routes used to get to a device. It will always use the last one that worked first, then if that fails, go back to another prior path that worked and mark that new path as the primary one. The result is much faster communications from ISY to end device. And if the existing path fails (for example, you remove or change a repeating device in the path), the network will automatically 'heal' itself and update with the new working path. I am not even sure if network heals are needed anymore, but I did one at first just in case. Bottom line is that I am MUCH happier now on the 500 series dongle than on the 300 series. And since the path I took (lots of re-syncs) may be required anyway in the move to 5.1.X firmware, might as well make the move to 500 series dongle now if you have not already.

The dongle is what contains your z-wave network. The dongle knows how to talk to each device and how to manage them. The ISY says "Dongle, tell switch ZW022 to turn on". The dongle takes care of all the details of how to communicate with it and do error checking, etc. If your dongle dies for some reason, and you do not have a backup, you will have to go through the long process of re-including each device all over again. This will also require you to rebuild all the programs and scenes that reference use these devices since the reference IDs will probably have changed. So every once in a while, especially after I add alot of z-wave devices or change their configuration, I will tell the ISY to do a Z-Wave => Tools => Backup, which will make a copy of the z-wave network. THEN, you also need to do a File => ISY Backup in order to save both the z-wave and ISY onto your PC. The ISY backup file contains a copy of the z-wave dongle backup file. If, in your example, your dongle survives, then it really does not matter much. But the dongle does not know the names you have given your devices. So you would, at a minimum, need to rename everything again. And no, I am no expert at all on this. I just like to pretend I do to make me feel useful in retirement.

I can back up and restore the ISY just fine. It is the z-wave dongle that I cannot backup. It took over a dozen tries and I was finally able to make it do a backup, but I have not been able to replicate doing a backup for the last 10 times. Here is what I get: dongle backup attempt.txt

UPDATE: Well, I am mostly back in business again. There were a couple issues I had to overcome: 1) Z-wave backups saved on 5.0.16B and 5.0.16C were not able to be used for 300 series dongles due to a bug in the code. And since the first thing the ISY does in a restore is to delete the existing config, before it tried and failed to restore, I was left with no network at all. And no backup to restore from. Well, not if I wanted to continue to use my 300 dongle. Good news is that the restore did work on a spare 500 series dongle I had, since the bug only impacts 300 series restores. If you are still using a 300 series dongle, and want to stay on it, DO NOT RELY ON YOUR Z-Wave BACKUP!!!!!! Either move to the 500 series dongle (which is what I did), or make damn sure you do not reset or try to recover your z-wave dongle backup saved from B and C of 5.0.16. 2) The second issue was just getting everything to work well with the 500 series dongle. This required 3 steps: I had to re-sync each device, one by one. (use the synchronize command by left clicking each device). For many of them, I had to move them within 3 feet of the ISY to make it work. A real PITA, but had to be done. I recommend against anyone else doing this on 5.0.16C, but rather wait for 5.1.x release. No need for you to do it twice, since I think doing these syncs will be needed for the new code due to lots of z-wave changes needed for for z-wave certification. I had to put the ISY on it's side. Seriously, that made a HUGE difference in coverage. Something about the antenna I guess. I put a Gen 5 z-wave switch about 1 foot away from my ISY in order to ensure signals could be repeated by a strong device. With those 3 things in place, I was able to get my system working almost as well as it was on the 300 series dongle. Chris is working on a new drop of the code hopefully within the next week. I am sitting on 5.0.16C for now. Only bad news is that I am unable to make a backup of my 500 series dongle on my 5.0.16C setup. Not sure if that is a bug or an issue with my hardware. But without a backup of the z-wave network, moving to 5.1 will definitely be sphincter clinching. Big thanks for Chris for hand holding me through some of this!! EDIT: After using my system with the new Series 500 dongle for the past several hours, it appears to be even more stable in terms of z-wave communications than ever. Past attempts to use the 500 dongle left me with poor communications so I always went back to the 300. But doing the 3 steps above solved it. I am very happy now with the 500 series dongle. This is good, since I think UDI might be dropping support for the 300 series dongle before long. So if you have not upgraded your system to the 500, now might be the time.

Day 2 of my nightmare upgrade attempt. What I am finding is that the z-wave restore process is broken. Not sure when that happened, but I cannot do restore reliably. And of course, step 1 of a restore is to wipe the existing records. So every time I try to do a restore, I end up with either no z-wave items on my dongle. I was able to go back to very old back up from February, and found one that does restore sometimes. But so much has changed since then, it does not really help me. This issue is with both the 500 series and 300 series dongle. 500 series works a bit better in being able to do a restore sometimes, but only with very old backups from 9 months ago. Anything recent fails. But the 500 series dongle is terrible and does not provide reliable communications, whereas the 300 has always been much better. And I cannot get the 300 series do take ANY restores. So if the new 5.1.0 release requires that we rely on doing z-wave back ups and restores, I am not sure how to proceed. My system is now working in a crippled state with the 500 series dongle. It only talks to about 70% of my devices, and even those are VERY unreliable with constant 'cannot communicate' messages. Queries mostly give error messages of cannot communicate. Sometimes they work.

Final update for this totally wasted day: none of my z-wave devices are functioning now, even after returning to 5.0.16C after doing restore. Something in this update total screwed my z-wave dongle. It no longer accepts communications of any type. It will not do z-wave restore, will not do z-wave backup, will not talk to any z-wave devices. Only thing it will do is factory reset for z-wave dongle. It was working perfectly before the update, and after the update is useless. This is with the 300 series dongle. Power down reboot does not help, tried 3 different PCs to make sure that was not the problem. Cleared Java cache. Nothing helps. And I gave one more attempt to use the 500 series dongle that never gave very good range so I stopped using. It also is showing the same failure. It will reset, but will not take any restore. My ISY is now a boat anchor.

I could not restore my z-wave dongle and could not talk to any z-wave devices. Finally, I looked in Task Manager in Windows, and found that I had several java sessions running in background processes. Once I cleared those out, I was finally able to do a restore to my z-wave dongle. I have never had this happen before, so I suggest anyone having odd problems restoring backups to ISY or zwave to check for extra java processes running. Even with that cleared up, only about 1 in 10 attempts to restore the z-wave backup will work. The other 9 times I get "Cannot enter programming mode". This is with the 300 series dongle. I ended up having to revert back to 5.0.16C in order to get my system somewhat stable from a z-wave perspective. I plan to stay there until I have an entire weekend to devote to this. EDIT: I am still having massive problems with z-wave system stability after attempting this upgrade, even after reverting back to 5.0.16C. My system has been rock solid for over a year before this. Big mistake trying out this new software. I have also learned that backups are not to be relied upon. Even with regular backups of the ISY and the z-wave dongle, being able to restore to that state I had before attempting to upgrade has failed. My system just does not work well any more. Only about 1/3 of my z-wave devices are communicating well. Other 2/3 give me incessant "communication failure" messages. So many that it is impossible to type anything on the ISY because I am constantly being interrupted by the pop ups that prevent typing. Really, really wish I had not done this 5.1.0 upgrade attempt.

I just upgraded from 5.0.16C to 5.1.0. I did a synchronize on just 1 z-wave device, and it moved it into the root the folder and renamed it to default name. It was not in any scenes, but was in a few programs. It remained in those programs just fine. So all I had to do was just fix the name. No biggie. I also noticed the 2 programs were in yellow, indicating an issue. Easy to find my doing an 'expand all' in programs view. Both programs turned out to be phantoms that were not there before the upgrade. I think they were very old programs I had deleted long ago that for some reason showed up again. I just deleted them. More to come as I find it. Thanks Chris for the continued development!!!! EDIT: As a follow up, I decided to do a synchronize on my z-wave pool controller. Unfortunately, most of the nodes went away and did not come back after the synchronize. I physically turned on/off some of the pool switches to see if that might cause them to be discovered, but no joy. Any ideas on how to retrieve the missing nodes? EDIT 2: Well, things are not going well for me. I could not get my pool controller to work at all under 5.1.0. I went back to 5.0.16C, and did a restore from just before the upgrade, but still my z-wave pool controller was messed up. So I tried to do a z-wave restore (I had done a backup of z-wave before I did the ISY backup before the upgrade) but I get an error message that z-wave cannot be restored. My pool controller is still non-operational. . Bob

I have been running 0.9.30 under mono, and just tried to use the script to update to the new version. However, when I go to the web page, it is still showing that I am running 0.9.30. The install script said it installed the 0.10.5 version, but did give a warning that the 8090 port was in use. Any ideas what I did wrong? I am running on an Rpi3 under Stretch. EDIT: I was able to solve by editing the nodelink.service file in /etc/systemd/system to change the execution line to ExecStart=/home/pi/dotnet/dotnet /home/pi/node/NodeLink.dll and then removing the similar line in rc.local to avoid having 2 instances running.

@io_guy, is it OK to run multiple instances of Nodelink? I am using the 1wire add on and want to have that run on 2 different Raspberry Pi's for report temperatures at different locations.

Have you tried looking at the other nodes of the device in ISY? I too had this problem in the past, but was always able to use a different node. For example, Open node was always on. But Closed node worked correctly. So I just used Close node for all my programs. Not sure this will help you, but just an idea.

On my 2441THv.10 thermostat, Heat and Cool states still work under 16b. Just verified.

I am one of those people still using RPi and ha-bridge as well. I had moved to their latest version (5.3.0) but ended up having to go back to an earlier version (3.5.1) due to changes in how dimming works in newer ha-bridge versions. Also, with v3.5.1 of ha-bridge, I can still use @barrygordon's AWS Configuration System tool to configure devices, programs, scenes, and variables more easily. For the AWS tool, I use 6.0.3, which is the last version Barry created. Screen shot below:

Just updated to B version. No issues that I can see.

Well, I was able to get this working really quickly using Nodelink with Relay Server turned on. Embarrassingly easy. I plan to also play with larryllix's code as well. Thanks again both of you for the help and guidance.