First off this is my first post but I’ve been using HA on Hassio now for right near a year after coming from a Smatthings setup many years. I’ve not had any posts because of being new I had more to learn than contribute and to date have resolved all my questions and issues with extensive reading of posts, 6.5k of them according to my profile. From day 1 I setup my instance with GoControl HUSBZB-1 stick on a new 2GB RPi4 and there was some learning curves for sure but I’m more familiar/comfortable with things now. Fast forward a year and one of my recurring problems I face is the dropping of Z-Wave devices randomly, namely Jasco in wall light switches of which I have 24. In the past couple of months I’ve picked up a some RPi4 4gb models and also grabbed a Z-Wave.Me RaZberry2 when they dropped in price.
What I’d like to is start using the slightly better RPi4 with the RaZberry2 daughter card and move from the original Z-Wave integration to the new OZW (beta I assume this is the new update-able one?). Do I need to remove all these devices from my current setup and then add them as new items on the new instance or is there an easier migration path I can take. I’m open to fresh installing a new instance of Hassio and going from there or using my existing instance and upgrading.
Last question for now but is there any way of running both instances of Hassio say one upstairs and one downstairs for better coverage and tie or cascading them together as one instance? I wouldn’t really want to manage 2 separate instances.
For what you are trying to do, you have to remove and pair your devices with the new zwave controller and Pi4.
Not needed to have a second instance of HAOS with the new ozw integration, you can throw just the ozw-daemon container on the upstairs Pi and run it as instance 2 reporting to your MQTT broker.
Thanks for the response, I tried to move over to a new Pi instance with the Razberry 2 and I think I got it all working even though I didn’t add any devices to it. I scrapped the whole move when in a doh moment I realized the Razberry was only Z-Wave and I’ve got a pretty solid mix of Zigbee and Z-Wave so it wasn’t gonna do me a whole lot of good as my primary HA.
I went ahead and moved my existing HA over to OZW beta and it was a little interesting switching at first as not all my items seemed to migrate over. I left it running on the new version all night and sure enough everything seemed to sort itself out overnight (my wife jokes whenever we add new connected technology it takes a little while to work right until it makes friends with the other connected items). This got me thinking though since my upstairs Z-Wave seems to be the furthest away from the HA instance it might make sense to slap that Razberry on an old Pi3 and use it as a wired gateway (your 3rd point above). I’m intrigued by doing this via MQTT but I have to say I’ve never used MQTT. I’ve heard of it for years of course but never directly had a need to use it much less in this capacity.
Are you or anyone reading in aware of a walk through or 101 doc how it works and plays with HA & Z-Wave / Zigbee? I’ve done a few different searches and read some articles in here and from the Home Assistant site on it but they don’t address the how/why of merging these together. While a newb step by step would be awesome I’m not expecting anything like that and just trying to get some direction on relevant info.
If you’re running the OZW beta, you’re already running a MQTT broker (server). You’d just have to point the Pi3’s docker instance to it, likely being your Home Assistant IP.