i recently moved the server hosting OH to the basement, so i cant use it anymore with my USB-Z-Wave-Stick. I know there are alot methods implementing a remote Z-Wave gateway, using very different approaches with corresponding costs in time and hardware (z-wave ethernet bridges, repeaters, modules, …).
I already have a Aeotec USB-Stick and some Raspis (2, 3), can i use them? Would be great if i dont have to buy new stuff. The Raspi doesnt have to do anything else beside being the Z-Wave gateway. I am not sure how to connect it to my OH, should i use MQTT for that?
The goal is a Z-Wave gateway that is in a different place than my OH-Server, connected to the same network. I dont want to work with Z-Wave repeaters and ideally dont want to buy new expensive HW.
Check out this.
Oh, and if it’s just about connectivity, zwave can do routing. You could simply add a mains powered device half way between your server and other zwave devices and force a network reorganization/network heal using Z-Way or the OH ZWave dev binding.
I know that i could just use devices, but i’d need 2-3 devices in an area where they would only repeat the signal and do nothing otherwise. It is a solution, but a bit expensive
I already read about socat, but didnt find that guide you linked, thanks alot!
That’s the method i’ve been using for both my zwave and zigbee sticks and haven’t had any issues except with the zigbee stick where I needed to set it to 57600 baud for it to work reliably. I also had to use this guide to “sticky” my USB sticks to a /dev device (/dev/ttyUSB-ZWave and /dev/ttyUSB-Zigbee in my case) on the pi because once I added the second one it was a toss up which one would get assigned ttyUSB0 and ttyUSB1 on a reboot which messed up my bindings.
Usually a single one will do if placed wisely, and you can get plug sockets for as little as 30€ sometimes and return them if it does not work as expected. But it’s your choice.
I have it running now, but i am not convinced. I use a PI as remote z-wave hub with the stick utilizing ser2net, and com2tcp on my windows server. It doesnt connect very well automaticlly, i always have to connect manually in case of a reboot or something. Often i get connection errors, and after 2-3 re-trys it works. I dont know wether its the com2tcp or the whole thing. I am leaning towards buying more z-wave devices now (expensive but working better, i guess).
You didn’t mention you run OH on a windows server. Hell, why are people so keen on using Windows ? For a 24x7 smart home server ? Get another Pi for that job, then ser2net will likely work more reliably as well.
