Raspberry Pi as Remote ZWave + HomeKit(Bluetooth)

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Hello Home Assistant Forums!

I couldn’t find a direct answer to my question, but if anyone had any advice or ideas I could really use them!

I run my Home Assistant on a server in my basement as a VM / HAOS. It is in a rack, surrounded by metal boxes, and under a staircase. Lets just say it isn’t the best RF environment for smart home protocols.

I use a raspberry pi 4 that is setup in a much better location for doing wireless protocols, such as ZWave.

I wanted to dip my toes into HomeKit via Bluetooth, and I noticed my raspberry pi 4 has bluetooth built in!

The Question:
What is the best way to bring ZWave + Bluetooth from my remotely placed raspberry pi, into Home Assistant?

Current Solution:
I currently am running ZWaveJS2MQTT on the Pi via Docker. From there I was able to easily add it in to Home Assistant. No idea on bluetooth.

Ideas In My Head:

  1. Run Home Assistant on the Pi, and link it’s event stream to my main Home Assistant
  2. Use an IP based tool to share my bluetooth to Home Assistant
  3. MQTT? But how would I add HomeKit devices?

And ideally, this would work in such a way that my main Home Assistant would be a central control point for the HomeKit / Bluetooth system. Adding/removing devices, automations, etc.

Thanks!

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3 years ago when this was posted, there was no way to do this as Home Assistant did not support Homekit via Bluetooth.
You can 100% do this as of Home Assistant 2022.8. though.

There is a project called USB/IP that you can use to share USB over IP. This should be able to share the Raspberry Pi bluetooth over the network form Home Assistant to pick up.

Bluetooth - Home Assistant (home-assistant.io)
USB/IP Project (sourceforge.net)

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Hello fellow Brendan,

That sounds really neat! Do you know if that would be extremely chatty with all the scanning? I do have my raspberry pi wired to ethernet, so it shouldn’t be a problem. But always trying to keep the network as congestion free as possible.

I’m going to give this a try tonight though. Thanks!

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Bluetooth is pretty good on bandwidth. I haven’t heard of any issues with excess traffic using USB/IP for Bluetooth :slightly_smiling_face:

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Hi! Did you get this working @NoggleBandit? I have almost the exact setup as you

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Can this work with a Raspberry Pi built-in bluetooth that is not a USB device?

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