I have a Home Assistant VM which is great because I can easily back it up, vMotion it, etc. This is exactly what I wanted as I moved away from my Hubitat as it was a giant single point of failure.
What is the best way to get Z-Wave and Zigbee into My Home Assistant VM? Ideally not hardware passthrough of USB, as that limits the flexibility of the virtual machine backups and migrations.
I do have a Hubitat C5, and I know there is possibility of using it as a radio. Is this generally a good idea?
I’ve seen you can use a Raspberry Pi and get the USB Z-Wave and Zigbee radios connected via network, is that a better idea?
Looking for any and all ideas. The more flexible, the better. My main concern is having a single hardware failure that takes down everything and relies on me waiting around for something.
Oh, my bad the LilyZig is also out of stock. I thought only the LAN Gateway was out of stock. There is a also a Sonoff WiFi ZigBee Bridge which I believe can be used the same way but connects to your HA over the network via WiFI.
Thanks, that first device looks pretty good! Shame its out of stock
Connecting over WiFi might work, but I’d really prefer it be ethernet. I’m in no rush though so maybe I should just wait for the ZigStar to come back in stock
If you’re electronics inclined the ZigStar site has the complete BOM for all of the devices with schematics and details so you could build it yourself.
If I were you, I would use C5 as a radio and bring Hubitat into HA’s fold using maker api or mqtt or other means. No need to empty your wallet just yet.
If the Hubitat integration works (well enough), great.
If not, or not as good as you would have hoped, or for any other reason, then you can look for RPi plus usb dongles for z-wave and zigbee. And then you can migrate off Hubitat.
These zigbee LAN gateway should be good, however I am not aware of any z-wave equivalent LAN gateway (I’m interested if anyone knows). So for z-wave you likely would still need a RPi in the end…
In short, unless you go zigbee only, where you have options for LAN gateway, I would recommended “RPi plus usb dongles for z-wave and zigbee”.
My 2 cents.
And some people on this forum would recommend AGAINST the sonoff wifi zigbee bridge - so much so some would say that the best place for that device is under the hammer and then into the trash can - even after you have “tasmotized” the ZBBridge.
Thank you for the suggestion @k8gg, I had not heard of the Maker API Method. Just set it up, and so far so good!
I think I will try keep my important devices WiFi and connected directly to HA (I have great WiFi with redundant AP’s, good high availability on my vSphere Cluster where Home Assistant Lives, etc) but some devices I just can’t get around being Z-Wave or Zigbee, like door sensors etc
I also have a few Z-Wave switches which I will keep, just to keep the Z-Wave mesh in good shape
I run zigbee2mqtt and zwavejs2mqtt on a Raspberry Pi centrally located in the house, and feed the data to HA running in an ESXi guest VM over the network. Works great! And allows you to update zigbee and zwave separately from HA, which is sometimes useful.
If you really want to run ZHA for zigbee, you can do that by remoting the Zigbee stick serial port over IP, but I prefer the zigbee2mqtt support. More mature, works well and supports more devices with more functionality.
I’m in the same position as the OP, virtualized HA. Unlike the OP, I don’t have any exsting zigbee or zwave gear, but as I start to want to expand my smart options at home, I feel like I need to move in this direction. @fresnoboy is there a tutorial somewhere to help me set up the Raspberry Pi and what USB device(s) are you using?
There are a number of ways of getting zigbee running separately from the VM. First though, you need a computer to run it on. I use Raspberry Pi’s, because I can power them over ethernet, and that means I stick it anywhere I have a Cat6 jack. You may not have that, so just powering off an outlet is generally fine too.
Zigbee2mqtt (Z2M) is pretty easy to install and setup - just follow the guide on their website. ZHA technically doesn’t support remote operation, but technically, you can use ser2net and remote the serial port from the Pi or remote computer to the VM over IP. But since Z2M generally works better and supports more devices with more features, at least at this point in time, I would go with Z2M. I would stay away from deconz completely.
The best controller is likely one of the sonoff zigbee coordinators: Amazon.com Flashing them with the right software is kind of a pain, but you don’t have to do it often. You can find YT videos that have complete walkthroughs on flashing like this one: Creating a Sonoff Zigbee Router (Router Firmware) - YouTube You can flash it on a different computer than what you are using as the zigbee controller.
I much prefer zigbee to Zwave. HA support for Zwave using the zwavejs2mqtt package does work remotely, and is installed about the same way as Z2M. The code quality of zwavejs2mqtt seems much worse than Z2M, and the graph that is supposed to show how devices are connected to each other just spits out data that’s flat wrong, which doesn’t help in debugging. If you go this route, I would recommend using a 500 series stick and not the newer 700 series stick, because the software seems more buggy for the 700 series. Also the network is not nearly as quick to issue commands as the zigbee network, again, at least as my experience. Zigbee devices are cheaper and a lot more numerous in any case. If I didn’t have these patio doors with yale locks in them, I would have gotten rid of all my Zwave stuff completely.
I hope this is helpful to you. Good luck, and the community support here is awesome.
Outside of initial setup, from HA’s perspective, it’s logically the same a s USB dongle (just with a really long cord), you wouldn’t notice any day to day differences.
Initial setup difference is trivial, setting the “port” to a tcp address instead of a local physical port.
There is a also a Sonoff WiFi ZigBee Bridge which I believe can be used the same way but connects to your HA over the network via WiFI.