Multiple z-wave sticks and Zwave JS + Zwave2MQTT

I have my main HomeAssistant OS build running on Promox in the house with a HUSBZB (1). Works great.
My Garage is too far away for any type of reliability with ZigBee and Zwave so I have a small Pi with a HUSBZB (2) stick in the garage and link the two systems with remote-home assistant. It works fine but not without its caveats.

I am running the new Zwave JS and Zwave2MQTT to manage them. I see there is a remote access port that allows external clients to connect. This gives me the sense that I can eliminate my remote-homeassistant integration and send my zwave info directly to my house HomeAssistant server.

Is this the case?

I tried to make the garage connect to the main one but ran into “no connection” issues. I’m sure I’m doing something wrong or might be missing a trick. Does anybody have a vague overview of how to do that or what things might trip me up?

if you are running zwavejs2mqtt on the remote pi to control the remote zwave stick then I would just use the “mqtt” portion of zwavejs2mqtt to send the data via mqtt to your main HA instance.

1 Like

I am running two zwavejs2mqtt instances for two zwave sticks via websockets and without mqtt just fine. In Home Assistant you just have to add them as two separate integrations with different ip addresses.

No need to use mqtt or a remote home assistant instance.

3 Likes

Yep, this is exactly what I am trying to do. The issue I’m having is figuring out how to connect to the garages websocket server. The instructions all say to use ws://a0d7b954-zwavejs2mqtt:3000 but this won’t work for the remote machine. I’ve tried the garages IP and hostname.

I finally got it. The secret sauce was two-fold for me. I had Zwave JS running as an integration on the garage accidentally. I was also struggling with what to put into zwave2mqtt->configuration->netowrk-> host line. I kept trying to put in a hostname when I needed to just put in a port.

This is terrific. Thank you for just verifying what I thought I could do.

Thank you but I wanted to use the direct websockets feature. It’s faster.

How do you install a second instance of zwavejs2mqtt?

EDIT: no worries, I figured it out and created a guide in case someone else wants to do the same: