My main instance of Home Assistant is hosted in a vSphere cluster in my basement. The rack that the servers sit in is practically a Faraday cage, so putting my radios in there wasn’t really an option. So, I decided to make something that would serve as a functional decoration.
Utilizing Home Assistant Remote I am able to host my USB radios on a Raspberry Pi in a part of my house where the reception is a little bit more acceptable. I’m using a Nortek Zigbee/Z-Wave radio alongside a Nooelec RTL-SDR. The SDR is currently running a fork of the rtl2mqtt addon so that I can poll on multiple frequencies. I will probably try to publish that to HACS eventually. It’s been great for pulling my utility meters into Home Assistant.
I removed the radios and USB hub from their housings to maintain the look of the bare circuit boards. I’m running everything through a USB hub because I was initially using an Aeotec Z-Stick and ConBee II, however, the Aeotec Z-Stick doesn’t exactly place nice with the Raspberry Pi 4. After enough trouble with it, even on the hub, I ditched it for the Nortek radio.
Additionally, I used my Cricut to make some vinyl decals to put on the inside of the Home Assistant and Raspberry Pi logos, to take up some of the blank space on the right side of the shadowbox.
I like the way that turned out, but if I had to do it over, I would do a couple of things differently.
- Move the power and Ethernet to a box behind the wall. Unfortunately, I didn’t really have the option to do that.
- Even better, use the PoE hat, as I am running PoE around the house. However, then cooling becomes an issue. I’d have to cut vents into the shadowbox.
- Use proper standoffs for everything, as using velcro will probably cause a static buildup over time that will make me have to replace everything.