Discovering Devices

Hello all. I am new to Home Assistant. My automation is currently through SmartThings.

I have a Raspberry Pi 3 that I have set up and installed HA on with the Pi with the all in one script. All seems fine except I do not know how to discover all the devices I have. Mostly Zwave, but a few zigbee devices as well. I watched a video from BRUH automation on setting up mosquitto and everything appears to be in order.

However, when I check mosquitto from the cli (mosquitto -v) the last line says "Error: Address already in use)

I’m not sure what to make of this. I can get to HA user interface, but no devices or services other than those from the default install.

Anyone have any ideas or can get me pointed in the right direction?

For the mosquitto server it’s possible that it is conflicting with the built in MQTT server.

Regarding ZWave:

  1. Make sure you have the ZWave configuration Stanza in youe config
  2. If you are starting fresh with a new ZWave stick you will have to go through the pairing process for the devices
  3. If you have done the above, the devices should show up automatically a short while after you start HA

Okay, I think you hit on an important part I missed. I need a ZWave, USB stick in the Pi, correct? I currently do not have that. I thought somehow HA would communicate with the Samsung Hub or over WiFi, not sure, seems I missed something critical there, LOL.

So, I need to get a ZWave stick. Yes? What about the Zigbee based sensors I have? Are the ZWave sticks multi-protocol? Or would I need something separate for them as well?

Thanks for your patience with all the questions. I apparently jumped in a little deep on this project, but would like to get it all sorted out.

If you don’t have a zwave stick you can set up the ST hub to communicate with HA but you need some 3rd party software to do that - check out mqttbridge, with that you can pull all of your ST devices into HA

Awesome! Thank you for taking the time to share all that@aimc. Looks like I got some work cut out for me. I would rather have everything running through HA so I think it will be worth it. I just need to get past the learning curve.

Sure thing! To answer your previous question, Zigbee devices won’t work directly with the ZWave stick - you would need something else to make them work, e.g. another Hub. Hue for instance has its own hub, and does the Zigbee part itself, and then communicates with HA over IP. If you have any native Zigbee devices you want to keep, your best bet would be to keep the ST hub and bridge to it.

BTW, I came from ST too, I am loving the stability and predictability HA brings, plus the fact that my setup runs just fine without Internet. I am only using my ST hub for one thing now - my garage door opener, and looking for ways to replace that so I can turn the ST hub off forever.

Excellent. If you find a way to bring the garage door opener over, please post it up, as I have a zwave device there as well.

I originally started with Nexia when they were still Schlage and while I loved the automation, they have been relatively slow to adopt new devices for use and only work with ZWave. So after several years with them, it was time to move to something a bit more flexible which led me to Wink for a very brief period of time then to SmartThings. I thought I was okay with ST until I came across HA and I knew I had to set up with HA. I finally got my Raspberry Pi and started working to that end. Now it’s just a matter of working out all the details, configurations, etc. to make it all work. I was not prepared for the mqttbridge, so I’m going to have to pause and learn how that all needs to be set up.

I will get there, it just may take a little bit of time to do so.

Heh, I tried wink too, but at the time it was so lacking in functionality that I gave up after about a week …

That’s funny because that is about the same amount of time for me as well. Great idea Wink is but needs some development. I still have the hub around just in case. However, my aim is to get off their cloud services for functionality and to HA so that as much as possible everything is ‘in house’. Pun completely intended.

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@aimc if I may trouble you once more, does the Raspberry Pi need wireless working for it to communicate with the ST hub? Or will all of this work over plain ole ethernet?

It’s just plain old IP to their cloud, so wireless or wired are both fine, you are not actually talking to the hub direct.

Excellent. Thank you for the reply. I guess, then, I will just boot the thing up, set up a static IP and then SSH into the Pi and go from there until I get the HA web interface going.

Good luck!