Help with zigbee hardware recognition

[daf]

Hi,

I’m at my wits end trying to get HA to recognize my zigbee dongle. Setup is as follows:

• I have HA running on a VM inside of truenas, this has worked well for me so far.
• Skyconnect zigbee dongle
• Machine is HP microserver gen 8 with intel celeron CPU G1610T

From my understanding (could be wrong) the issue i’m having is that my hardware will not pass through the usb into a VM, it doesn’t have the virtualisation capability - not supported by CPU.

So the questions i have are:

• Does anyone have any suggestions on how i might be able to get this up and running on my microserver?
• If not - is it possible to install my zigbee dongle on a raspberry pi, but keep my HA on my microserver and have them linked somehow?

Appreciate any help / suggestions.

[daf]

alternatively, is an ethernet zigbee dongle an option? Or will i have the same issues with hardware passthrough?

[Nick4 (Nick)]

Have a look at this: Installing HAOS in a VM on TrueNAS SCALE

[RonnieLast (Last of the Ronnies)]

@daf

If not - is it possible to install my zigbee dongle on a raspberry pi, but keep my HA on my microserver and have them linked somehow?

Yes, for sure. I just implemented this over the weekend and it’s working well for me:

Connecting to a remote Zigbee coordinator with ZHA using ser2net

This is a quick guide on how to connect ZHA to a Zigbee coordinator on different hardware than the hardware HomeAssistant is running on. Reasons for wanting to do this could include: HomeAssistant running on hardware in a bad location in your house Needing to use ZHA over Z2M Long USB cords causing instability in Zigbee network You will need another computer running Linux. A Raspberry Pi would work fine. I am using some really old Optiplex SFF running Debian. On the linux computer, run apt…

[troy]

So there are two versions of TrueNas and multiple ways to run Home Assistant on each version.

I’m guessing you are running HAOS inside a VM on SCALE…

I don’t think it’s a virtualization issue (I could also be wrong), but my understanding is that if your CPU did not support virtualization, you would not be able to create the VM to begin with.

Does your Sky Connect show up in TrueNAS? How are you passing the Sky Connect to your VM from TrueNAS? Are you using USB pass-through?

EDIT - I found this…

Installing HAOS in a VM on TrueNAS SCALE

fyi the skyconnect work’s

[daf]

Thanks Nick, i’ve looked at this, and get stuck when it comes to the usb passthrouhg. just can’t get it working.

[daf]

Hi troy,

Sky connect ‘sort of’ shows up in truenas:

but i can’t get the passthrough step in the guide to work at all… i get the following error, and can’t seem to rind the right setting in the bios:

[EINVAL] attribute.pptdev: IOMMU support is required

[daf]

That’s awesome, thanks heaps, this will definitely be my plan B.

[troy]

Okay, I understand now.

I think you we’re right about the virtualization thing. I believe IOMMU would show in Intel bios as vt-d but as you mentioned, that feature is not supported by your CPU

[michaelblight (Michael)]

You might be better off upgrading the CPU to one that supports IOMMU, and assuming the motherboard does (this suggests people have had success). An ethernet zigbee dongle might solve that one problem, but you’ll be stuck with the next thing you want to passthru. And you’d save some money.

[daf]

Yep, good point.