What’s the consensus on using a dedicated Raspberry Pi as a ‘gateway’ for my main HA install, which sits on a more powerful PC?
It would allow me to move the ZigBee/Z-Wave/RF interfaces to a better RF friendly location in my house, and make reboots more pleasant. I’d also move my MQTT server to this.
All my automation infrastructure already centers around MQTT (except for Z-Wave JS, which I’ll fix), but I’m wondering if I’m missing any major reasons why not to do this.
Thoughts?
Can’t find a valid reason not to. I run Zigbee2mqtt and mosquitto separate from my HA to.
I run a screen-cracked pc as server for HA, but all gateways are dedicated server, like Hue bridge, Raspi for RF433 to MQTT, Raspi for RF868 to MQTT, Raspi for ZWave to MQTT.
I feel it is better, since the gateways are easier to maintain and in some cases the gateways can maintain the status of the devices when HA is restarted.
Especially the RF-gateways are nice to have separated from the HA installation, because RF usually does not go that far, so a gateway close by to route it further over Wi-fi is just the perfect solution.
My RF links ( GitHub - seb821/espRFLinkMQTT: ESP8266 gateway between RFLink and MQTT server) and Sonoff rf bridges (https://docs.openmqttgateway.com/) run mqtt native, so no need to add an extra pi for these.
Are you running another instance of HA or a basic Linux install with docker?
RF from one end of my house to the other is garbage, I’ve been thinking to add a pi with another zwave and zigbee coordinator. The z-wave JS integration supports connecting via http, so it doesn’t need an MQTT layer to handle the interconnect (unless you want it anyways). It also supports multiple coordinators at different endpoints. ZHA appears to only support one integration at a time, so i’ll have to think that one through, or switch to zigbee2mqtt for one of them…
Basic Linux with bare metal installation of mosquitto and Zigbee2mqtt