Best (non Mqtt) LAN HA extension option for garden office

Hardware
1

Hi all

I’ve got a garden office which is outside the range of my main HA System and zwave (which is my normal preferred system). I’ve been looking for the best option to extend automations into the office via LAN, as I’ve got network down there including WiFi via eero mesh. My hope is eventually I can use my Eero via thread, but I’ve given up waiting for that! At the moment I’m using Shelly WiFi devices, but I’m wondering if there is a zwave or zigbee gateway with LAN that would work out of the box? I’ve seen a couple of threads in here but they seem to rely on Mqtt or re flashing firmware and ideally was hoping for something a bit more plug and play.

Also interested if anyone has managed to get thread working yet via Eero?

2

MQTT is pretty plug and play since you just need to setup the add-on broker and point your Z-instance at it. What’s the hesitation there?

3

More the setup and management of devices through that method. I’ve got Mqtt setup and using it for ESP32 devices for occupancy detection with phones but that about all so far. I guess just doesn’t seem as easy to add devices as it is with zwave but maybe im missing a trick to make it as easy?

4

zwave js connects to HA using a websocket which can routed over whatever network you want. Run the zwavejs (or better zwavejs-ui) server on a remote system on your LAN and point the HA zwave integration to its IP. Done.

Long term, MQTT is a better solution though.

5

You mention zigbee as well. zigbee2mqtt is very good and more or less like using a native non-mqtt solution as far as setting up new devices is concerned.

You hit “enable devices to join network”, then it joins, then it is available in HA. You can rename it to something more suitable in the zigbee2mqtt gui, and bang, it is renamed in HA.

6

Thanks all. I’ve potentially found a solution as it seems the new Shelly plugs have a built in Bluetooth gateway / relay. I’ve got a Shelly Bluetooth window sensor that was discovered and added really easily once I enabled the gateway in the Shelly device and it responds very quickly. I’ll need to play and see what other ble devices work.