I have a Aeotec stick running on an Raspberry Pi 3B acting as a server using the usbip serial drivers. It works fine when everything is just running - never quits or crashes or loses communication. And that lets me run Hass.io in a HyperV VM server with all the nice things that provides.
It is fragile during startups, upgrades, etc. I have put in a lot of steps to auto-restart the other side with changes in one side (thanks to suggestions in various threads here). That helps. It is still not quite there.
The good news is I don’t have to touch the zwave box often; the bad news is hass.io gets upgraded a lot.
Most times I upgrade Hass.io I need to reboot both a few times, or log in and restart services a couple times to get it all going again. It is annoying.
Alternatives:
There are three servers listed in the documentation, they all seem to carry a lot of overhead and attempt to sell themselves be hubs. I hope for simple as simple is usually more reliable over time. But maybe – Vera in particular looks fairly simple (in fact it looks like an rPi case).
Are these better solutions? Do they remain stable during reboots, upgrades, etc.?
Anyone using Vera as a pure zwave server? Like it?
Are there any better solutions for getting zwave access that’s not fragile during restarts/transitions?
Two Home assistant instances? one with zwave (less upgraded, less restarts) and another one.
I use zwave in openhab. For me it has the advantages of a much slower release cycle and live configuration updates (either file or ui based). I expose my zwave items to home assistant via mqtt.
I thought I saw somewhere, once, a zwave to mqtt bridge (ahh, here it is: https://github.com/OpenZWave/Zwave2Mqtt ) so this might be a good option if it works ok, as it would isolate the zwave network from home assistant.
This has been discussed in a couple places and recently. Do a search for Zwave and you’ll find some recent solutions. You can run two instances of HA and share data between them using MQTT statestream, use the REST API to talk between the two, or use zwave2mqtt as mentioned above. In any of those cases, it decouples the Zwave from your “main” HA instance. Zwave2mqtt has come a long way recently and now has proper MQTT topic creation and discovery.
Will search. Do the devices from this zwave ha instance appear as devices explicitly on the other ha instance?
HA worked quite nicely on the Pi when I did it, it just wasn’t fast enough if I was doing a lot of changes, the restarts or calling up logs was quite slow. But just running it to control zwave would be nice.
It depends on the method you use. Zwave2mqtt if setup properly and MQTT discovery enabled, then it should auto discover everything and show the switch, light, whatever the device is. Don’t quote me on it as I haven’t done this myself yet, only read about it. It’s on my list of things to test and implement. I believe using the REST/API or MQTT statestream between two HA instances requires you to create the devices manually in the non-Zwave HA instance.
I just came from Hubitat and formerly SmartThings.
I found ZWave2MQTT relatively intuitive, but then just like the native Home Assistant Z-Wave all of my devices started showing up as “dead”.
I tried messing with keys, resetting the add-on, resetting the Aeotec stick, I got my nodes to stay “alive” for longer, but ultimately they all died for some reason.
For now I’m doing the worst possible thing and running all of my Z-Wave devices through SmartThings.
At least SmartThings is really good at including the devices and “just working” with Home Assistant…
When their cloud is up that is…
Ultimately I want ZWave2MQTT to be my Z-Wave solution for HA but my WAF was dropping fast, so I had to failback to something I knew worked.
Good luck!
I’ve had no luck with this. I got a new HA instance on a separate rPi 3B, I got the zwave2mqtt running, it found my stick and all my devices. I put mosquito on the main HA and pointed at it, and then put in mqtt and discovery on that main HA and… nothing.
I may have a configuration problem, but I have had zero luck finding anyone that said “this works”. A couple of examples of use used statestream or other techniques and manually set up each device, which I really, really do not want to do.
Going back to usbip I think, until this matures. I’d love to see a real example with discovery working, if someone has one???