Hey, I’m hoping someone can help me out here. I’ve seen people mention in other places that it is possible to pair a second controller to a z-wave network, then use that controller to pair additional devices and shift them to the primary controller. Is this supported in HA/z-wave js?
I’ve been moving a bunch of z-wave devices from an old hubitat setup to my HA setup, but it is getting harder and harder to pair them as they’re farther away, and certain things like light switches are not easy to move closer to my HA device. I was hoping I could get a second z-wave stick, connect it to my laptop, add it to the mesh then use it to onboard devices that are too far away from the primary controller to pair reliably.
Just a bit later, I found an even better way to pair faraway devices without having to uninstall them and move them closer to my hub. I can’t believe I never looked to see if this existed before, but I ended up using USB/IP.
Basically, I shutdown the z-wave API in z-wave js, moved the USB stick to my laptop, used usbip bind to make the stick available to share over the network, used SSH to proxy the port to my VM server, attached the stick on my VM server with usbip attach, then mapped the attached USB device in to my homeassistant VM. Changed the device in z-wave js and restarted. Once that was done, I could walk around with my laptop and pair my devices while standing right next to them. Made the whole process go a lot faster.
Of course, this all depends on having HAOS running in a VM, since the USB/IP tools aren’t available in HAOS. Thought I’d share anyway, in case anyone else is looking for a similar solution.