Executive summary: Can SmartThings Z-Wave hub co-exist with Home Assistant Z-Wave?
Outline: Currently have a SmartThings Z-Wave hub which controls about six wall switches. They are all being controlled by both Alexa and Google Home (either device can control any of the switches).
Now I want to integrate Home Assistant. One might think Home Assistant could be yet another controller (like Alexa or Google Home), so they’d all work in harmony.
Question: Have been working on this for over a week, and not asking for tech help (yet). Just wanting to find out if I’m headed in the wrong direction (or not). Am I? Don’t want to waste time on an impossible direction.
Details: HA running as VM on QNAP NAS. Have Aeotec Z-Stick Gen5 installed in QNAP, the USB device is passed-through to this VM instance, been configured in Z-Wave JS to MQTT, then configured in Z-Wave JS (have a green checkmark). At this point, it seems like a dead-end. Nothing located automagically (like some other stuff has been). Don’t know what is the proper way to get Z-Wave devices to be discovered (yes, have used a LOT of Google and searching and reading, lest I wouldn’t have gotten this far).
Have begun to wonder: Is it even reasonable for me to expect wireless devices to just be found like that? If it were, then what would prevent me from detecting any at a neighbor’s house, or they being able to connect to my devices? Do I need to go through a re-pairing of the switches to the Aeotec? If so, then do I lose access through the SmartThings hub? Is this a case of “pick one”? Which of course brings me back to the point of having two other controllers (Alexa and Google Home) both able to control them, no conflicts. If I can do two, why not three? Ideally, Home Assistant would have just communicated directly with the SmartThings hub over the network, and utilized its capabilities directly, without needing to reinvent the wheel with the Aeotec device.
SmartThings and Z-Wave JS control their own networks. The devices you associated with SmartThings belong to that network. Z-Wave JS cannot see them and vice-versa (there is such a thing as secondary controllers that can make this possible, but it’s not well supported).
If you want to switch from SmartThings to Z-Wave JS, you’ll need to re-pair the devices to the Aeotec.
That’s how I did it. Had Smartthings and migrated over to an Aeotec stick by moving a device at a time over. You get to a point where network reach becomes a problem so it becomes easier to just cut everything over. I also found that having the two Zwave controllers close together reduced my range. Now with ZwaveJS everything is working fine under it.
Yes. I started with HA with the idea that I would slowly move all my SmartThings things (both ZigBee and ZWave) over to native HA. However, they’re working so well that I’ve decided instead to just leave well enough alone and just add the new devices to HA.
As freshcoast pointed out, they have their own networks, but of course, HA can see both of them.
Keep in mind that, if you do go to switch devices from the SmartThings hub to the HA stick, you will likely need to exclude them from SmartThings using the ZWave utilities and then add them to HA. This will also likely involve a renaming of the entities so you’ll either need to edit them in HA to their previous names or edit the new names into automations and scripts.
Thanks. I did look into that, and opted for the take-the-plunge method of going all-in with Home Assistant. Excluded all the switches from the network and was able to add them in to HA!