Addon suggestion - Virtualhere USB client - WIP

Installation Home Assistant OS
1

I’d just give you a heads up that im working on this. And any help is welcome. Will be making a repo out of this at some point.

What Virtualhere does, non technical:

Have a server (RPI or any board somewhere in your house)
Have a client (hassio docker image)

Plug in a usb device in the server, set auto discovery on on the client, use it natively on your client

I use this at home to connect to my DSMR + RFXtrx hub since my power cabinet is downstairs and my hassio (VM on FreeNAS) is upstairs.
Now i’m switching to an Odroid XU4 with HassOS on it, and i’m figuring out how to tackle this.

Things to sort out:
How to reshare container USB with other containers

Documentation/work done by other already:

Official docker image x86_64 by virtualhere:
https://hub.docker.com/r/virtualhere/virtualhere-client

Client flavors:
https://virtualhere.com/usb_client_software

Arm server container (outdated):

Server flavors:
https://virtualhere.com/content/usb-servers

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2

Hi @eh50,

Is this still an active effort? Unfortunately I can’t be of much help, but i am very interested in this. I guess this will have to be packaged as an addon for it to work on Hassio.

My use case is that I run Hassio on HyperV and there is no USB passthrough possible.

Thomas

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3

Hey

My XU4 where i was planning to install HASSOS on died, i’m trying to fix it. Don’t know if its a hardware or software failure.

Are you running HASSOS or hassio on linux?

4

Hi @eh50

I’ve just gone fairly all in on Hass.io in Hyper V and have just realised I may not be able to use the z-wave stick I’ve ordered.

As above, is this still an active effort? Is there anything I can do?

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5

I’m going to tackle this over the next few days.

My understanding is the VirtualHere client will need to be installed on the Hassio/docker host and then passed into the guest.

6

Maybe you can also install the server / client inside an add-on, instead of on the host. After all they are docker containers so with the right privileges it may work.

Thomas

7

Good idea, looks like there’s already one available too:

https://hub.docker.com/r/virtualhere/virtualhere-client

8

I’m trying out HA and have also setup Hass.io in Hyper V and was wondering if there was any further development or advice in setting up VirtualHere client? The host machine has already been setup with VirtualHere server component and Z-Wave USB device.

9

Hi, I would also be very happy if this would be available. i am willing to test :slight_smile:

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10

This would be a good addition to Hassio, both as server and as client!

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11

I’m unfamiliar with how to go about this either, but my setup is similar to yours (HA on HassOS in Hyper-V). I thought this would be easy until I realized HassOS was a read-only filesystem.

Did you get anywhere with this?

12

I use esxi now, usb passthrough works fabulous!

13

Same here, I also switched to esxi. And, additionally, most integrations also support ser2net for serial ports which resolves most of the use cases anyway.

Thomas

14

Can you tel something more about that ser2net in homeassistant? I can’t find any usable examples (config) on how to get that working…

15

You need a ser2net server somewhere, can be an RPI somewhere or even some hardware serial port server. There are plenty of options for this.

Then in the configuration of the integration you enter an IP and a port instead of a local serial port. Examples of an integrations supporting this are https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/rfxtrx/ or https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/opentherm_gw/.

Thomas

16

Hi Thomas,

thank you. Yes, so far understood.

do you have a configuartion example of:

  1. the lines / config to add on an rpi (probably linux command ser)
  2. and example of a line that can be used (within an integration) - what does it exactly look like?
  3. (optionally) do you have a cheap example of a usb server (to ip)?
17

Any news with this ?
I am running HA on a nuc today but it would be nice to move it on my Windows server 2019.
So I would be happy if someone has done that journey before or have any news with virtual here in HA

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18

I know this is an old topic, but +1 for me, we need this in Homeassistant, I have a HassOS VM on an ESXi cluster (soon migrating to Proxmox) I need a solution to be able to live migrate the HassOS VM from one host to another having 2 dongles attached to it (Bluetooth and Zooz Z-Wave Plus), at the moment they are in passthrough which prevents any live migration of the VM.
Is there any other know solution that can easily work? I see VirtualHere to be very easy and cheap vs DiGi Hub. Are there any updates for this integration?

19

Good morning every body. I’m very interested in this too. I’m running Home Assitant in DOcker and would like to retrieve all the USB connected UPS of my house. I put virtualhere server on eahc concerned machine but now… Any tutorial appreciated !
Thx.