Copying Dump of Internal z-Wave Controller to External USB Dongle

Community Playground General Discussions
1

I have hit on a minor snag with my Vera 2.

In brief the internal z-Wave dongle in the Vera 2 stopped working and tech support has told me there is nothing they can do about it. My Vera 2 was just over 12 months old (by a few days) when this happened so it is out of warranty.

The Vera is in a property around 4,500 miles away on other side of the Atlantic. It is in a property I visit once per year and needless to say that visit ended about 5 minutes before the fault with the Vera 2 developed at the end of August.

Reconstructing the network will be painful because I need to send somebody out to do that and of course it will change all the device ids and I won’t know what is what. The easiest and cheapest solution would be to restore the dump of the internal dongle onto USB dongle, but technical support have told me that doesn’t work.

Obviously I assume I could restore a network dump to a new Vera 2 onto an internal z-Wave dongle, but given that the Vera 3 is about to arrive in a month or so I didn’t really want to buy another Vera 2. Unfortunately I can’t really live without the z-Wave network for another month or two until the Vera 3 is released.

My question is do any of the experts on the forum have any experience with restoring a dump of the internal z-Wave dongle to an external USB dongle?

2

I’m guessing you were running the 3.20 branch? That won’t work at all on a dongle, but It may be possible to take your 3.20 backup and revert it to 2.78? Your still left with the port assignment issue but…

The backup contains the port assignment so when you try to restore it looks for the internal chip. You would need to change the port within the backup file prior to the restore process, which is possible.

My suggestion, ask tech support this question. If you have a dongle sent over seas and plugged in, would they be able to work their magic to get a 2.78 backup (taken from the internal chip) restored to the dongle.

JOD.

3

As it happens I have a 2.78 backup of the internal dongle because my backup taken before upgrading to 1.1245 which I only did in the middle of August.

So I assume the answer is that I merely need to encourage the Vera to pick the right dongle?

4

As @JOD suggested, I’d contact MCV Support to make sure that these binary dumps are compatible between dongles; and if so, I believe they also have a way of restoring just the Z-Wave backup.

5

Tech support told me the other day that:

Unfortunately I tested and it’s not working to restore the devices from an
internal dongle to an USB one so I’m afraid you will need to rebuild your
network.

Obviously I have no idea how different the dump of the dongle is or why this would be and I won’t know until I get an external dongle and dump the contents. I have been able to compare the dumps for the 3 internal dongles in Veras that I have and it looks like there are some pretty obvious patterns emerging.

If anybody is prepared to let me see a dump of their USB dongle then I would be very interested, but I recognise that would require some trust on their part.

My gut instinct at the moment is that with the internal z-Wave device the id of the dongle might be sitting somewhere around 0x190a of the dump file, that the devices themselves are listed at around 0x19f0 onwards and the config details for the associated devices are around 0x38f0 onwards, but I could be way off the mark.

Incidentally if anybody has a dump of a USB dongle and can tell me if it reads “ZeNsYs” at 0x1900 I would be interested as that in particular might suggest there should be file compatibility.

Thanks in advance to anybody who might be able to help. The honest truth is that I can’t believe I will be the first or last person to have an internal dongle that fails and consequently I am sure other people will want to do this kind of restore to a cheap external dongle in the future.

6

Results for Vera V2@1.1.1338:

0x0000: "BF"
0x1400: "ZeNsYs"
0x1408: HomeID
0x14F8: some data

Results for Vera V1@1.1.1338:

0x0000: "BF"
0x1909: HomeID

No ZeNsYs …

7

I think the internal zwave chip on the V2 is on a daughter board, maybe talk to MCV and see if they can get you one of those only, or maybe try source one through NorthQ or somewhere else on the internet perhaps?

8

I eventually asked somebody to go to the house, get the vera out of the cupboard, unscrew it and take a look inside the box.

They did so and discovered that the z-Wave component had come ever so slightly unseated. The module was pushed in again and the Vera switched back on. Amazingly that cured the problem, so if you do have an issue with z-Wave dongle missing this is something you probably want to check.