I have two adjacent buildings on the campus I manage. They are too far apart for Z-Wave to work on a single controller. They share a LAN.
I have two Raspberry Pi’s set up running openHABian, each with a USB Z-Stick. I can access them on the LAN without issue. Previously, I had Vera controllers in each location and I could manage them from a single account.
I set up an account on myopenHAB.org and I was able to set up my first controller. Unfortunately, it appears that openHAB Cloud only accounts for a single openHAB instance. I would love to find a way to manage both from the cloud.
I’m looking for suggestions on the best way to handle this. The way I see it, here are my options:
Install and manage two instances of OpenHAB Cloud, one for each location.
Is there some kind of binding to allow a master/slave setup between two controllers?
Perhaps multi-controller functionality is on the roadmap and I should just contribute & wait?
Not really, but you can use MQTT to ‘shadow’ item states among instances. But that’s a complicated setup and MQTT binding v1 is outdated and v2 is brand new so I wouldn’t really start with that option currently.
Multi-controller should work, but controllers of course need to be on the same system.
You could try extending the serial interface of one of RPis to the other one using ser2net. Search the forum, there’s a number of tutorials on this.
This already works. I have 3 Z-Wave controllers working with my OH instance. They all work with USB over IP solutions. If you have LAN this should work very stable.
@vossivossi, did you install openHABian on the remote nodes? Or just regular Raspbian, since all the control is happening from the single instance anyway? Also, which USB-over-IP package are you using? Thanks.
I am using OH on a Windows platform. For the USB-over-IP job I am using special hardware with Windows Drivers available from Silex (DS510) and SEH (myUTN-50a) . For me they work perfectly stable while some software solutions I tested before did not work reliable for more than a couple of days.
The problem with the Z-Wave binding in OH (or with the underlying serial binding to use the COM Port) is that once the connectivity is lost (even if only for short time) it won’t recover by itself. Only a restart of the Z-Wave binding helps in this case. I already implemented rules with the Exec binding for this use case but since I have the hardware solutions these rules have not been used anymore for a long time now.
hi @vossivossi,
I am also considering a SEH myUTN device rather a USBIP software option for a remote zigbee stick for my OH. Does the SEH support ubuntu environments, as my OH is a docker installation inside ubuntu 16?
