Z Wave

Z-Wave

What Works Today

Device Sentinel recognizes Z-Wave natively. A device whose integration domain is zwave_js means Z-Wave JS is running, and Device Sentinel classifies it correctly.

On a Z-Wave house, everything built on the Home Assistant event bus works identically to any other stack. This includes rhythm learning, freeze detection, unavailable detection, and unknown detection. It includes battery threshold and falling detection, and signal recording where devices expose signal entities. The problem list, the daily brief, and all reports work properly for Z-Wave right now.

What Is Missing

Because Device Sentinel is currently built only for Zigbee2MQTT, a Z-Wave house does not ship with certain features today.

You do not get inclusion-mode recognition, so a hand re-include during an inclusion window is not set aside and is instead learned as the device's rhythm, unless you use Maintenance Mode. You do not get controller outage recognition, so a controller going down blames the devices for silences instead of explaining them. You also miss the availability of a second opinion beside freeze verdicts, and you do not get a Bridge sensor.

The Zigbee2MQTT versions of these features are described on Zigbee2MQTT and The Bridge and Broker Sensors.

Why Features Are Missing

Device Sentinel runs fine on a Z-Wave house today, but the Z-Wave-specific features cannot be built without a Z-Wave user's help. The author has no Z-Wave devices and refuses to build against documentation alone.

To build these missing features, the project needs a volunteer to provide a reference system with real reference data.

The Open Questions

A volunteer will help answer a few open questions. Does Z-Wave JS expose a readable controller state? What does it emit when an inclusion or exclusion window opens and closes? What do its devices' node status, last-seen, and signal entities look like in the registry? Finally, what happens on the bus when the controller drops and returns?

How You Can Help

A volunteer can provide three things.

First, a diagnostics download. Go to Settings, Devices and Services, Device Sentinel, select the three-dot menu, and click Download diagnostics. This file contains device names but no passwords or tokens. It is shared privately, not posted publicly. A private channel will be arranged after you open an issue.

Second, answers to a few questions about your Z-Wave setup. Provide your controller model, roughly how many devices you have, and your mains versus battery mix.

Third, a willingness to run a few small experiments and report what happened with timestamps. You will open and close an inclusion window at a noted time. You will restart Home Assistant at a noted time. You will briefly unplug and replug the controller at a noted time. Each takes minutes, and none of them harms a Z-Wave network. Lastly, you may be given a shell command to run in your terminal.

Start the process by using the open an issue link, titled "Z-Wave reference system".