ZWave remotely?

Configuration Z-Wave
1

Hi

I’d like to know what best option(s) is(are) avalaible to cover a large area in ZWave ?? I mean I have a place with one main building and a second one not far but physically separated (so no way one ZWave board can cover both as I don’t have any zwave devices outside that could do the bridge ?
Add a second Zwave interface/controler in that building ? and if so how to connect it with first one ? or get whole system seen as one in HA ?
Little lost how to do that at best to get whole thing working in HA correctly ! I have network between both buildings

Thanks for ideas, suggestions,

Vincèn

2

The MQTT Eventstream component is probably what you’re after. You can have both buildings with their own HA system, and Z-Wave controller, able to run local automations, but also aware of the state of the other building, and able to include that in their own automations.

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3

@Tinkerer Great, didn’t notice that for interconnection of HA system :wink: Will definitively give it a try :+1: Thanks

4

MQTT Statestream is probably better. It was introduced in 0.54

I have used MQTT Eventstream in the past and work well but has some limit I had to workaround.
Eventually I stopped use and just used MQTT directly.
I think statestream would be better and plan to migrate to this.

In my case I have small campus with multiple (3-5) HA server controlling separate areas
(1) main HA Server I use as main frontend
Other (4) just push state to main HA using MQTT or act when MQTT message received
Main HA control all automations presence detect or time of day, etc.

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5

Thanks you two for suggestion with MQTT Eventstream and Statestream and it sounds to be exactly what I need for interconnect of my HA systems :wink:

6

@tmjpugh Side question about your setup: how did you handle MQTT server ? You have one with each HA ? and if so how are you doing the Statestream as it looks like HA can’t connect to more than one broker :frowning:

Thanks

7

I recently set this up to get a remote Pi to report back to my main instance. This works well inside a single network. If you are on separate networks you may want to use a cloud MQTT broker or figure out how to pass the MQTT messages among the networks. This works well for sensors and to obtain states on the main instance, however, taking action on the remote Pis takes quite a bit more setup.

I setup mosquitto as my broker using this video as a guide.

Then setup the main HA instance to point to that broker

mqtt:
  broker: 192.168.1.24
  port: 1883
  client_id: home-assistant-1
  username: !secret mqttusername
  password: !secret mqttpassword

On the remote instance I have setup

mqtt:
  broker: 192.168.1.24
  port: 1883
  client_id: home-assistant-2
  username: !secret mqttusername #same as main pi
  password: !secret mqttpassword #same as main pi

mqtt_statestream:
  base_topic: remote

That publishes all HA state changes to the main MQTT broker on the main Pi.

Then you can setup sensors on the main Pi to read those changes and display them on the main instance.

Here are a few examples that I have. The remote instance has a sensor with the entity ID “sensor.dht_sensor_temperature” you can see this broken out below in the first example with “remote” per the state stream config as the base topic.

  - platform: mqtt
    state_topic: 'remote/sensor/dht_sensor_temperature/state'
    name: "Temperature"
    unit_of_measurement: "°F"

  - platform: mqtt
    state_topic: 'remote/sensor/dht_sensor_humidity/state'
    name: "Humidity"
    unit_of_measurement: "%"

  - platform: mqtt
    state_topic: 'remote/binary_sensor/motion/state'
    name: motion
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8

You can use the above to get the states into your main HA instance from the remote instances.

See the post above for publishing commands to a remote instance. You could replace the command state with a template to just check the sensor you create from the MQTT state stream.

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Main HA in docker container on server 1
Mosquito in docker container on server 1

All mqtt messaging pass.through mosquitto broker on server1