I’ve been using HA for quite a long time - since way back in the 0.xx days, and I’ve gotten fairly adept in navigating the yaml world, and have gotten fairly used to it. Of course now the newer versions turn that on its head. I’m currently on 2021.10.0, which I believe is the newest version that’ll work without migrating off the ‘legacy’ Open ZWave setup. I’ve been looking to try to migrate over to the ZWave JS, but I keep coming up dry. My current setup is a Ras-Pi running an implementation of USP-IP, which my Home Assistant VM (running in a VMWare VM) connects to. This works quite well, except for the rather rare instances where there’s some sort of communication hiccup, in which case everything goes off into the weeds and basically requires that everything be restarted, the RPi hosting the ZWave stick first, in order to get everything working again. There is no seamless, graceful reconnect, unfortunately. Truth be told, I don’t want any of the ‘cloud gaga nonsense’ - I just want HA to run my ZWave devices and THAT’S IT. No Alexa junk. No ‘Hey Google’ junk. None of the ‘cloud’ junk. That’s why I ditched Plex - they got so ‘cloud gaga’ that it was a hard nope out. I have ZERO need, want, desire or interest in ‘cloud’ junk. Honestly, I’d LOVE to see a branch offered that didn’t even include the ‘Home Assistant Cloud’ option. Frankly, I don’t even like it just being there. It seems to me that, like Plex, that started out AWESOME, but then spiraled down the toilet with the cloud junk, I fear that Home-assistant is doing the same thing. Bringing in the cloud junk that some people want no part of, and not giving an option to have a branch that doesn’t include any of that junk at all.
The ‘Zwave JS UI’ seems to be a more robust way of doing it, BUT… no matter where I go, I haven’t been able to get things working.
It seems to me that documentation in general has gone WAY downhill. In the past, I’ve had no issues following documentation to get things working, but this has been an epic fail. Honestly, docker sucks. It would have had a place like 20-25 years ago before virtualization was what it is today, but now, it’s unnecessary additional complexity. The few docker installs I’ve put out have been more of a pain than any install I’ve done on a base linux install.
Anyway, I haven’t been able to get ‘Z-Wave JS UI’ working on its own on a RPi to act as a bridge between a home Assistant VM and the USB stick… Which kind of brings me to a concerning point…
In my experimentation, I imaged an SD card with the latest Home Assistant image, it went through it’s ‘up to 20 minutes’ bit, after which I fiddled with it, and was able to install the ‘Z-Wave JS UI’ add-on and get it to work with my USB stick. Now here’s the problem. The first time I did it, when it wanted me to select the device, I was given the option of ‘/dev/ttyAMA0’ or ‘/dev/ttyACM0’. My USB stick being /dev/ttyACM0. After doing that and rebooting, the Z-Wave JS, it still came up and in the ‘Z-Wave JS’ Info, I had an option to launch the WebUI - and that worked. Now the problem is I re-imaged the card to tinker with some other things, and when they failed, I decided to re-image it with the same HASS image I had used an hour or so prior. I did the re-image, it did its ‘20 minute thing’, and then I went to add the ZWave JS compoment. This time, it installed, but when I went to configure, I got ‘/dev/tty/AMA0’ and ‘/dev/serial/by-id/usb-0658_0200-if00’, instead of ‘/dev/ttyACM0’, so I select the ‘/dev’serial’by-id/blahblahblah’ knowing that’s the proper device, but now, there’s no web UI option presented… so why did doing the same thing two times result in two different results??
The fact that I haven’t been able to get ‘ZWave JS’ working as a standalone server on a RPi aside, and the insanity of doing the same thing twice with different results aside, it doesn’t appear there’s a way to specify a remote ZWave JS IP to use - it seems like the only way to configure it is with a local device.
Truth be told, I’m happy where I am, except for the sensitivity of the USB-IP connectivity - it doesn’t take a lot to make that go off in the weeds and break everything until it’s rebooted. The ZWave JS seems to be a more robust solution, but I’d prefer to keep my HASS on a VM, not a RPi. In addition, there doesn’t seem to be a good way to migrate from the ‘old school’ way to the new ‘HA OS’ way… the new way does seem to have some possible benefits, but I’m not keen on being locked out of the base OS…
Even if I’m not sold on ‘upgrading’ to the latest version, I think moving from the uber-sensitive USB-IP implementation I’m running now to a ZWave JS based implementation seems like a good idea - if it can be made to work.
That being said, does anyone have any suggestions on how to get ZWave JS UI working on a Raspberry Pi (preferably on a base Rasbian install, no Docker nonsense - docker sucks…), and then linking HomeAssistant to it?
Edit: after some sleep and a fresh look, I discovered why the Web UI was available the first time around and not the second - apparently, the first time, I installed ZWave JS UI, which is all the way at the bottom of the addons page, not the ZWave JS that’s at the top of the page. The second time I installed the ZWave JS that’s at the top of the page.