I run HA on a virtual machine and access my z-wave dongle on a Pi over the network with socat - it works great and allows me to place the z-wave dongle somewhere central in the house and keep HA running on a powerful server in my basement.
I am in the process of adding in a RF transmitter to my Pi Model B so I can control a handful of RF devices through HA. Is it possible to setup the implementation of Raspberry Pi RF Switch to work with socat?
Yeah… not sure if it is worth the effort - I don’t have much RF gear or plans to buy any in the future.
I am trying to control a media lift for my TV, I just need to send either open or close commands via a 433Mhz transmitter. I don’t want to spend too much time on it so I will probably create a simple web hook from HA to the Pi that triggers a Python RPI-RF script.
Why not attach the device to the host and pass it through to the VM. I use 10 foot USB cables to reposition some USB devices and they work just fine. I have two VMs with Zwave dongles plugged in and one also has a Bluetooth dongle. I can’t imagine a 433 RF device would be a problem. 433 goes further than Zwave and penetrates better.
It is an old house made of brick and plaster. Even with my all my z-wave repeaters I had tons of z-wave issues when the z-wave dongle was in the basement attached to the server. There is really no way to get a USB cable of reasonable length to my server rack.
Since moving to a Pi for my z-wave dongle I went from dodgy z-wave performance to near perfect performance so I’m really happy with how things are working.
My house has steel siding which means I live in a Faraday Cage. We have no cell reception in the house in spite of the fact we are within spitting distance of several towers. With careful placement of ZWave devices, I have solid connectivity in a detached garage and a utility shed 50 feet from the house.