I am about a month in to my Home Assistant Yellow setup. Right now I’m using a Zooz ZST39 USB stick for a Z-Wave controller. I bought a ZAC93 GPIO module, but chickened out on installing it when I learned that (1) I’d lose Bluetooth, (2) it seemed complicated for a relative beginner, and (3) Home Assistant documentation seemed to recommend against it.
Did I make the right choice? I’m probably about start over with my Z-Wave integration. (Discussed here.) So now would be good time to make the switch.
Are there non-aesthetic advantages to to GPIO module? Or am I better off sticking with the stick?
Personally, I find that once you have some Bluetooth proxies you don’t need an interface on the server, but you can always get a cheap dongle for under $10 if you find that you need it. Note the newer Pi5 doesn’t use mini-UART so doesn’t require disabling Bluetooth for enabling GPIO UART.
That doc page is old enough that it still says 800LR is not supported, even though it has been for over a year now. So I wouldn’t take the lack of mention as a non-endorsement.
The main advantages of the GPIO module are usage in situations where you have GPIO pins instead of usb ports. USB3.0 ports in particular are known to cause RF interference with 2.4ghz dongles (Zwave interference is less documented), hence extension cables are common. Another interesting use case is when you need to locate the Zwave controller somewhere else from your HA server, you can add an esp32 to make a Zwave serial-over-IP proxy.
Super helpful, thanks. I’m using a CM5, so that solves Bluetooth. That should make the set up a lot less intimidating. I’ll follow the instructions in the post you linked, probably this weekend. I’ll post an update.
As an update, I managed to install the ZAC93 GPIO controller on my HA Yellow with Pi CM5. Not going to say it was easy. Setting up the key-pair SSH to modify config.txt was at the edge of my competency. But I figured it out and it is up and running smoothly so far.