Today I managed to delete my “Hub” that has been working fine for 6 years, thinking it was my legacy Logitech Hub that I no longer required. I am absolutely astounded there isn’t a massive red warning saying if you remove this hub you will lose all your connected devices and getting it back will be insanely painful. That said I am where I am, and I did delete it so let’s move on.
I couldn’t find a way to re-connect the hub, so in the end I have factory reset it and that has at least got the hub back in to SmartThings. However I am struggling to add my Z-Wave devices back to it. I managed to get a Water Sensor to register, but the driver is incorrect and I can’t figure out how to change it. It all looks very different from when I set this up many years ago, and seems like the drivers are missing for devices. I also have a Yale Connexis L1 that had a custom driver, I’m struggling to get that re-connected and when I do suspect I will have the same issue with the driver as I’m having with the Water Sensor.
All my searches turn up articles for “Edge Drivers” and support folk telling people to write their own driver. Even as a software developer myself this seems like a bit of a stretch. Feels like it’s been very dumbed down and all the customisation that I loved about it has been lost. I only have 4 Z-Wave devices I’m trying to re-connect:
Generic Water Sensor
Generic Motion Sensor
Yale Connexis L1 with Z Wave module
Aeotech Wave Light Switch
It’s been quietly working away in my cupboard for years, with me never having to mess with it much, so I haven’t really kept up with the way things have gone. Is this thing now going in the bin, or is there a way I can resurrect it and make it work how it used to work when we had the graph.api.smartthings.com site?
z-wave devices - have you tried peforming a z-wave exclusion on them first? You can do that from the app or the Advanced Web App. in app, find and open your hub tile, tap 3 dots and choose settings to find z-wave utilities. In Advanced Web App, go to the Hubs section and tap on your hub name.
@jkp@JDRoberts thank you both for your replies, I think I am slowly getting there. I’ve managed to re-add most of my devices and they look to be working, just need to figure out the motion sensor. It adds its self as a default Zigbee Sensor with no actions, I recall in the past I had to tell it which driver to use, but when I select “Driver” I get a No Results Found. I’m frantically looking to see if I made a note of which driver I used in the past to get the motion working, however even if I find it I can’t see how I would apply it. I’ve also tried searching using the magnifying glass and selecting devices from there, it still re-adds as a Zigbee Thing.
This means that the platform was unable to find a matching fingerprint for the device. So it just added it as a generic “thing.”
So start by going to the advanced page and see what fingerprint it’s using. The following FAQ explains that process and has the link to the advanced page.
And again, once you’ve found an edge driver that you want to use, here’s the FAQ on how to change to it. But you can only change to an edge driver that matches the fingerprint for your device, so that’s why the first thing is to find out what the fingerprint is.
The bit I don’t understand is it refers to a ‘channel’ page or an invite to channel link. I’m guessing I have to search for a channel that covers my hardware fingerprint? I think I found a driver on GitHub but am unsure how to get that driver on to my device:
Stock drivers are written by Samsung and automatically sent to all hubs.
All custom drivers are added in the same way.
get the invitation link from the author. You might find it in a forum thread here, or in GitHub, or in a blog article. This is the link to their “channel“ which is the selection of edge drivers they have published for other people to use.
follow that link and subscribe to the channel.
select the specific driver you want downloaded to your hub. There have been some reports of this taking a couple of hours to complete, but usually it happens right away.
(Details of how to see which drivers are on your hub and all that are in the FAQ that I will link to at the end of this post.)
that’s all there is to it. Once the driver is on your hub, as long as the fingerprints match, you will be able to use the instructions in the other FAQ link that I gave you on changing from one edge driver to another.
Oh, and before I forget: you can only have 50 edge drivers on your hub, which would normally be more than sufficient since many drivers cover multiple devices.
However… A number of members have run into an “out of memory“ error message on their hub, if they have more than a dozen or so custom edge drivers. We are not given any tools for seeing how much memory is available or how much has been used, so it just becomes trial and error to fix this if you do run into it.
But as a general practice, if you download three or four different edge drivers for the same device in order to see which one you like best, make sure you delete any ones that you are not going to use. Same thing with any diagnostic drivers that you might download for a temporary troubleshooting process.
Thanks, I’ve marked that as the solution, just to be clear for anyone else following in my footsteps later. I joined the Channel by Enrolling and then selected Install for the driver I wanted. After a short period it then appeared in the Drivers Section of my Device and I have been able to switch to it and get the thing working.
I guess the main change in the new way of doing things is before you could pick almost any driver and try it, where as now you can only see drivers which match your devices fingerprint, which I guess is better in a way but the process of getting more drivers to appear may not be immediately obvious.
I have read this and many other threads, but I keep coming back to the same question - how do I search for a driver with the correct fingerprint? I know how to find the fingerprint, but how do I find the matching driver, if it even exists?
You can also install a driver you suspect might work and then use the API Browser+ to see what fingerprints a driver supports. Select Hubs->“your hub”->Installed Drivers->Details.
We used to have a community wiki, but the person who was paying for hosting it has moved on and it’s no longer available.
So now you have three choices.
first check to see if the device manufacturer offers one. For example, Aeotec, zooz, Inovelli, and Homeseer do. But most manufacturers do not.
as @h0ckeysk8er mentioned, check the quick browse lists. These are designed to make searching this forum faster.
If you don’t find it from one and two, you can check the community request Threads to see if someone has already requested it. If not, you can add a new request. Make sure you read the first post in that thread carefully as it explains what information you will need to post to make a request.
There is one request list for Z wave, one for Zigbee, and one for LAN devices.
I don’t know what it would take to resurrect the Wiki (if that is even possible). I have a place we could host it (like I’m doing for the API Browser+), but I don’t know what resources it requires or if any of the old content would be able.
It was a mediawiki site. I have all the data and would be happy to pass it along, but I don’t have much time right now to help with getting it set up. Feel free to reach out to me via email at brice at obycode.com if you are interested.
