Only then can you try a join, just be ready to try over and over until you get a clean handshake. It should signal in some way to tell you exclude worked. If your device acts like it is doing nothing when you try to join, then you may not have excluded it yet. Then upon entering join mode, pressing the join button and I was instantly connected. But it was easy and worked the first time. Don't be fooled, you MUST do a successful exclude.įor the minimote, I think I hit as button under the door, probably the join button or the - button. It took me hours to figure out that smartthings exclude does nothing, but the first clue is smartthings itself indicated it was failing, but offered the option to "force" the removal which is just deleting it from the app without a proper exclude. Use Hubitat, or a Z-stick to do your excludes, and them be prepared to repeat your joins several times. So don't try excluding from Smartthings, you will be wasting your time. I'm not going to walk you through what those looked like because that was last week I got it done, and I don't feel like re-living it right now. And it seemed to fail at different steps in the process. They would blink like pairing was successful, and hubitat would show something had happened, but it wouldn't complete. I had some really stubborn switches that took forever to pair. If Hubitat misses one of the handshake steps, it does not recover, and you must run exclude again. Pairing is a more complex handshake, and it fails if any noise interferes with the handshake. You might see it almost pair two or three (or 5 or 6) times before pairing is successful. The exclude is the easy part on these, but the pairing is prone to failure with the Hubitat. Once you have excluded successfully, you can following pairing instructions.įor some of the older GE z-wave light switches, you will need to exclude them and pair them several times. The minimote lights tell you something is up, some devices flashj an LED in a new way, and others might blink their light or make a noise with their relay. On other devices like a minimote you might have to try different buttons, until you are successful. For light switches that is usually by toggling the switch on or off.
So here is how exclude works, you enter your Hubitat or z-stick into exclude mode, then activate the button on your device that answers the exclude handshake. So it is up to you, but the Hubitat exclude mode does work.
#AEON LABS Z STICK SERIES 2 FACTORY RESET PRO#
except that I sometimes handle a lot of this stuff, and almost fit into the pro category. I ordered my Z-stick from Amazon, and 20 minutes later discovered I didn't need it. That's right, you have the power in Hubitat to fix these stubborn z-wave devices, but the first step is to understand that the exclusion process is universal, it is not tied to your old hub, so stop trying to get zwave exclude to work on smartthings, it won't. The fact is your Hubitat's own z-wave exclusion mode is all you need. But wait! Don't run out and buy a Z-stick unless you are a pro that does this for a living. One popular zwave exclusion device is the Aeon Labs Z-stick. You don't have to exclude from the device it is paired to, it can be excluded from any device that has a working exclude mode.
I don't know what smartthings is trying to do, or why it doesn't work, but that doesn't matter, it simply doesn't. It is the correct thing to do, but only if it works. So don't even try, it doesn't work at all. What I think I have found is that Smartthings does not correctly exclude zwave devices. None of them hold a candle to Hubitat, and I'm throwing all of them away. I have 4 different smartthings hubs, as well as many other popular hubs. I don't have a zwave protocol analyzer, but I did spend 10 years running a IOT lab where we debugged things for companies like AT&T, and I have been a smartthings user for nearly all of that time. Some devices I can add to Hubitat after a factory reset, but many devices simply refuse then as well. This applies to all manner of zwave devices. That advice is correct, except that it doesn't actually work at all in my experience. So everyone tells you to exclude your device on Smartthings before migrating to hubitat.