Connecting a remote Zigbee sensor to Home Assistant?

Configuration Zigbee
1

I have a Home Assistant running in a remote server rack/DC (location 1)

I want to add some ZigBee based motion/light sensors in a different location (location 2).

My plan is to use either Slaesh’s CC2652RB stick or Electrolama zig-a-zig-ah! (zzh!) in location 2 to talk to the Zigbee sensors.

I can get IP connectivity between the two sites.

However, I can’t feasibly run a USB cable between the two (plus the HA instance is virtualised, so I’d need to do USB pass-through and all that).

Question is - what’s the best way of connecting a remote Zigbee stick to a HA instance, over TCP/IP?

Can you install HA on a small NUC/Mini-PC in location 2, and have that act some kind of secondary HA proxy, and talk to the main HA install? How would you set something like that up?

Or is there a better way - e.g. is zigbee2mqtt well supported in Home Assistant? Could you somehow broadcast the sensor readings onto there, and have Home Assistant build automations around that? (It sounds like this would be less supported and very fragile compared to some native integrations, but curious to see what people have seen).

2

Zigbee2mqtt fragile ? I have been running zigbee2mqtt for over 2 years now, and it is one of the most robust software packages I have ever used.
I never hesitate to recommend zigbee2mqtt over ZHA.

3

As long as location2 will only enable zigbee devices, I second Francis that Zigbee2MQTT is the obvious choice.

If, otoh, the 2nd location would also handle other types of “local” radio, e.g. bluetooth, a “slave” HA might be considered. I created a custom component to make the “slave” and “master” communicate over MQTT.