I’m looking for a way that my HA can talk to Zwave and Zigbee devices. The problem is that almost all of those seem to be using USB. I’m using a server with HA in a virtual machine and I would pefer to keep USB out of it.
I’m also not a fan of having smart things connecting to the internet, as one of the reasons of having Zigbee is replacing my Ikea hub, that requires an internet connection to function. I also want to use Zwave devices as I’m currently researching a radiator valve, but all seem to be using Zwave or their own internal app, which I don’t like.
A Tasmotized Sonoff Zigbee Bridge could solve half the problem. I experimented with one for a few weeks and it seemed to work well. It can be centrally located in your house
I found two USB solutions:
Aeotec Z-Stick Gen5 which is around 50 euro’s
Z-wave .me Plus which is 35 euro’s but requires a 59 dollar license
That’s excluding a 20 euro Pi, power supply, SD card, etc etc. That’s probably a hundred euro’s (or way over with the second version) for getting a z-wave device working.
It’s probably possible to do that with KVM as well, but I want to avoid it. I would have to find out if it’s possible to add a USB PCI card to my server if I really wanted to go that route, but honestly, I’d like to avoid it if possible. My server is going to be placed in the attic soon which is the furthest away from the first zwave device I’m going to install and it has to go through quite a lot of reinforced concrete and brick to get there.
you can use a ‘dummy’ zigbee as transponder relay…
Ser2tcp would work from any machine (i use w10 myself, but i guess there are also ser2tcp solutions for linux), so maybe there is another machine you could use??
Fwiw, I’ve used zigbee2mqtt’s remote setup on a pi zero before that sent the serial data back to zigbee2mqtt running in a container (on a virtualized host). Nowadays it looks like ser2tcp is recommended instead.
It worked well enough and allowed me to have the Zigbee dongle centrally located (which my network cabinet definitely isn’t).
Requires another machine to run on. That would require a RPI which is another 100 bucks, on top of the dongle. And with the sonoff solution given earlier, if that works, I’m already set.
I think I’m going to forget the zwave as it seems like an impossible and extremely expensive task to set up. Going to see if I can get a wifi or zigbee radiator valve instead.
I wish I could put everything on wifi instead. It would make my life a lot easier.
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