This is my first post here, as I have just started using HA. Previously I had tried Vera, HomeSeer and Indigo. Each had it’s +s and -s, but I have been very happy with Indigo 7 on a Mac using a HomeSeer Z-NET ethernet zwave interface. The Z-NET is mainly a Raspberry Pi 2 running Debian with some clever software providing communication to the outside world.
I wanted to try HA, but was unwilling to start from scratch with a new z-wave interface… My z-wave network is comprised of several devices and the idea of re-adding them to a new z-wave interface felt like a pain in the butt. Since the Z-NET already had all my devices registered, I wanted to keep using it as the z-wave interface on HA. So I needed to figure out how HomeSeer and Indigo “talked” to the remote device. My research uncovered that it’s a two part solution: the Z-NET is the “sender” unit, while the computer running HomeSeer or Indigo is the “receiving” unit.
The Z-NET as the sending part, uses something called “ser2net”. I searched around and found out that the other half, the receiving end, is normally provided by it’s counterpart, named “socat”, which can be run on Linux or Mac
I’m by no means a Linux expert, but figured that half of the solution was already in place with the Z-NET. So I tried installing the needed components mentioned in the second half of the instructions (beginning at USB device client) on a new Hassbian system, which I had just burnt to a new class 10 SD card. It was easy enough to adapt the instruction to listen to the Z-NET (using port 2001, instead of 3333, as explained in the article). The username was also changed to “pi” and I’m happy to advise that openzwave support on HA works flawlessly with the Z-NET if you make the right changes as explained above.
If you do a search you’ll also find info on doing the same thing with a Vera controller. Same components and steps for the most part for converting a Z-net to work with HA.
Thanks for the tutorial unfortunately it does not work for me. I am running hass.io in a docker container on debian. I am able to get everything working and tested using the the tail on socat.log I see the same output. For some reason HA give me an error message saying invalid config zwave. I can see the sym link from dev/pts/1 to /dev/ttyusb0 and the permissions are correct on the /dev/pts/1 file. I modified the socat.conf to change the port to 2001 and my username for my debian user account.
Is there something else I am possibly missing on getting this to work? I read something about a network key for zwave not sure if I need that or where to even get it from the z-net.
I know this is a really old thread, but I was wondering how this was working out? Did you end up keeping the Z-Net solution or go to a USB based solution?
Looking at a different solution to USB as my Home Assistant server is not in a central place and it would be nice to have the Z-Wave controller in a more central place in the house.
Same here. I’m coming from HomeSeer and would like to try out Home Assistant with my existing Z-Wave devices. Did anyone else get this working? I’m thinking this should be supported by default in Home Assitant.
I’m new to HA, switching from HomeSeer. Don’t ask why, but it has to do with a girl.
I have four buildings, each of which has a HomeSeer Z-net box. Plus, there’s the gun range, 1,800 ft away from the main campus. There is ethernet and wifi down to the range, but no way z-wave can reach that far OTA. So I can’t use a USB dongle. I need some solution gets its signal over ethernet and turns it into z-wave.
I’d like to use the HomeSeer z-net boxes that I have, but I will switch if there’s something else that will work.
Is there something else? Or a way to make the z-net boxes work over ethernet with HA?