Open Source Thing Gateway / Hub

tomdavidson · May 27, 2018, 4:03am

Hello, Im after a multiprotocol gateway that does not require an Internet connection - something open source would be even better. The reason for the inquiry is that it seems most consumer devices are tied to a “cloud” service that does not necessarily respect the user’s privacy and security.

Any recommendations?

Dim · May 27, 2018, 4:05am

openHAB 2 ?

tomdavidson · May 27, 2018, 4:21am

@Dim I should have been more explicit - I need a gateway to connect zwave and zigbee devices to my OH2 server over an IP network.

Dim · May 27, 2018, 4:29am

There is a USB stick/dongle that does dual Z-Wave & ZigBee (I can’t find the link to it now)
You could also use 2 USB devices (one for each protocol)
Check out this thread also: EU Zigbee dongle
For Z-Wave, I use Aeotec Z-Stick Gen5 P/N: ZW090-C (link)

do you already have a controller for the Z-Wave and ZigBee ?

tomdavidson · May 27, 2018, 4:55am

I do not have a controller but there are reasons I am not looking at dongles:

ZigBee’s range is not enough
My OH2 runs from Docker and I do not want to limit to a single Docker host with the USB dongles

It’d be slick if OH2 could treat The Dog Gateway as a thing and discover all connected items as if the Dog as a transparent bridge of somesort. Wink, Vera, etc all require Internet connectivity for either API connectivity via “cloud” and/or or data collections. There has got to be some consumer class devices that are ethernet to zigbee (& others) bridge.

Dim · May 27, 2018, 5:01am

I can suggest some DIY options (not sure if they fit you):
a) build another OH2 instance (e.g. on an rPi3 with USB dongles on it) to act as the gateway to your main Docker OH2 instance. You can easily link the 2 OH2 instances with MQTT.
or
b) Use another rPi3 with Share Z-wave dongle over IP (USB over IP using ser2net / socat ) guide
c) Link The Dog with OH2 over MQTT

tomdavidson · May 27, 2018, 5:19am

Sweet - what are the drawbacks of mqtt integration vs an attached device?

Dim · May 27, 2018, 5:23am

hmmm… complexity (to set it up and maintain it) and the addition of an MQTT Broker in the middle (you will need it anyway :))

otherwise… I can’t think of any other “negative” aspect.

You could say that having 2 systems to maintain is “riskier” (2 points of failure) but I wouldn’t worry about this so much. Just make sure that you provide good quality power (optimally, protected by UPS) to your Raspberry Pi3 gateway to avoid issues with SD Card based file-system corruption.

tomdavidson · May 27, 2018, 5:39am

Thanks for the direction Dim - with MQTT I will need to manually configure each thing and item whereas some directly attached devices facilitate autodiscover?

Dim · May 27, 2018, 6:04am

Correct.
You can use the MQTT-EventBus method (search in the community for examples) to simplify the integration between the 2 OH instances.

Also, check @rlkoshak posts on this kind of integrations. He has done this kind of stuff before.

bob_dickenson · May 27, 2018, 12:39pm

FYI : the dual Z-Wave/Zigbee dongle is the Nortek HUSBZB-1. It has been discontinued by the manufacturer for a few months. I have one. The Z-Wave side works well enough. Zigbee—not so much.

rlkoshak · May 27, 2018, 2:56pm

You can auto discover with the OH connected to the dongle(s). However, the main OH will have to manually create Items to represent those exposed through the mqtt bus.