Remote dongles

[kolaf]

Hi all,

I’m considering switching to this after having tried OH2 for a while and lately Domoticz. It seems to fulfil most of my demands, but there is one point I have not found any solution for by googling.

In addition to my main controller with zwave, MySensors, and RFXtrx, I have two usb dongles connected to a separate computer at a secondary location (one zwave and one MySensors) that I need to control from the main HASS installation. Is there a solution for this? Using Domoitcz I was able to create a slave version of the application on the secondary site and have each its devices to the main installation. It was not so easy with OpenHab, there I had to create scripts to create virtual USB devices on the main system that linked to the remote devices using TCP/IP.

Is there a good way to do this using home assistant?

[chairstacker]

Have you seen this discussion?

RPi as Z-Wave/ZigBee-over-IP server for Hass

Project goal Setup an RPi as a USB-over-IP server. Run Hass on a VM (or wherever) and connect to a Z-Wave/ZigBee/etc dongle physically plugged into an RPi somewhere on your network. Background I started working with Hass using an RPi3 and an HUSBZ-1 combo Z-Wave/ZigBee stick which worked well but I have concerns about long-term reliability of SD cards on the Pi and while performance was OK, I have a virtualization farm here that provides me much better performance and availability than an RPi …

[kolaf]

I have seen that link, and I have done some research. This is my findings:

1. It appears that sharing the USB dongle from a remote machine to the local machine as a virtual USB device will not help since hass does not support multiple zwave or mysensors devices.
2. Set up a separate home assistant installation on the secondary computer. This worked fine and allowed control of the local devices, but ideally I would like to have them in the same instance.
3. I configured MQTT event stream, and this initially seemed to work. However, as it turned out there was a serious issue with this setup. Since there is a zwave network connected to both computers, both system had nodes with the same numbers. As negativities were synchronised from the secondary system to the primary system, the node names started overwriting the node names of the existing zwave devices registered in the primary system. This made everything very confusing and I had to disable even stream.

I think the only remaining option for me is to explicitly share sensors from the secondary system with the primary system using separate mqtt topics. For switches on the secondary system seems that the only option is to build a set of automation rules to send information back and forth between the secondary and primary systems.

[martinhjelmare]

@kolaf

since hass does not support multiple zwave or mysensors devices

Multiple mysensors devices/gateways are supported by home assistant.

[kolaf]

Really? That is good news. How would I go about configuring it? Suppose I have two z-wave dongles connected to different USB ports (one local and one remote virtualised as a local USB port) what would the configuration look like. We provide two separate zwave: sections in the configuration file with the two ports, two USB parameters to the single zwave: section. And how would this work out with the naming. Nodes on both the zwave networks have the same names (node 1, node 2, et cetera), will this cause any problems?

[martinhjelmare]

I was only talking about mysensors gateways. I don’t believe multiple z-wave dongles are supported.

[kolaf]

Oh, sorry, I didn’t read it carefully enough.

[anon35356645]

@kolaf

Set up a separate home assistant installation on the secondary computer. This worked fine and allowed control of the local devices, but ideally I would like to have them in the same instance.

can you explain how you did?