Hello Lemmings.

This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while; basically, I want to move my zwave node away from my main HomeAssistant system.

I’ll try to be brief; my current config is a single mini/micro system (Dell, I believe), Core i5, 8G RAM and an SSD, it’s a ton of power for HA and massive overkill, I know. The problem is that the system is located in a remote room of the house, so the signal isn’t exactly the best and I have some nodes that are linked through 2-3 other devices; I’d like to move the USB Z-stick to a more central location, and I don’t think a USB extension is going to cut it. I have ethernet wire which is far more viable to get a connection across to the HA computer. I don’t want to move the HA computer away from where it is, since there’s backup power where it is; so my idea would be to use something like a Raspberry Pi (now that availability seems to be improving), connected by Ethernet using PoE (for power availability from the UPS). Provided I can get a Raspberry Pi, and all the related and required parts together, which should be fairly trivial; how would I connect the zwave dongle on the Raspberry Pi to the computer running homeassistant?

I haven’t considered this before due to the pi being so difficult to get since I put together the homeassistant system. Ideally, I would want several of these systems placed at key points around the house so that I wouldn’t need any of the zwave nodes to relay communications, but that’s future plans more than anything - I would need to source several zwave dongles and get them all on raspberry pi’s and get them working together… So going about it towards that end would be a bonus; but at least I want to do some research on it and figure out if I can even relocate the dongle at all first. Any infromation to that end is appreciated.

I’m currently using ZWaveJS UI.

  • bigredgiraffe@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I have had mine set up this way for 3 or 4 years now using a raspberry pi and zwave2mqtt/zigbee2mqtt and it works very well. Both of those have their own UI though which could be better but definitely get the job done. I have the pi centrally located in my house and my home assistant machine is in a rack with the rest of my gear.

    • MystikIncarnate@lemmy.caOPEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      I’m using zwavejs ui, which, AFAIK, is the “new name” for zwave2mqtt.

      I’ve been using it since I started. what I don’t know is how to get it communicating. It will all be on the same subnet, ethernet connected. Any tips/tricks/guides?

    • MystikIncarnate@lemmy.caOPEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      this is good. I gave it a once over, but I’ll go more in-depth when I get the pi. Any tips on migrating my current zwave net over to it? or do I just need to move the dongle over? I want my HA to be disconnected from the zwave for as little time as possible; since the family is using it to control ~half of the lighting in the house at this point.

      Right now, I should just need a raspberry pi, SD card, case, and a PoE hat, maybe a USB extension for the dongle, and I should be all set to go; so I would prep most of the software on the pi before-hand, and run the config for the dongle as soon as I take it out of the HA system. I’m hoping start to finish, it would only be ~1 hr or less of downtime.