I’m in the process of setting up a Z2mqtt based network for environmental monitoring. it’s going to be running directly on my server, with a broker connecting it to an instance of home assistant rather than having home assistant manage the zigbee network itself.
I’m specificly doing this because I want to do some debug with the dongle that I can’t do if home assistant is managing it, and so that the network will remain live even if home assistant is unavailable.
I’m installing z2mqtt server on node.js on windows server. I already have a zha network running on home assistant over skyconnect. so this will be my experimental network rather than a live one.
Right now I’m only looking for advice on setting this up, nothing else, any other business is for another thread. not this one.
In a typical Z2M setup there are three components:
A MQTT broker (typically Mosquito)
A Zigbee2MQTT bridge.
Home Assistant
There is a great deal of flexibility in how you install them: You could just install HAOS which allows you to run them all on one machine or you could manually install each component on a different machines.
However you install it, you need to ensure:
The Zigbee2MQTT bridge can connect to the broker.
HA can connect to the broker.
There is no requirement for HA and the bridge to be able to connect to each other.
As long as you have two Zigbee coordinators (one for ZHA and one for Z2M) and both are on a different channel/frequency you can run both ZHA and Z2M at the same time.