Adding ZWave devices to my Home Assistant smart home

There are some quirks related to running standalone Home Assistant (HA) from a Docker container. I found that the route to enable support and add a device using ZWave is not well documented for this HA configuration, especially for someone new to and unfamiliar with ZWave.

Running ZWave JS server #

My biggest bugaboo was that…

Without a ZWave hub on the network, a standalone ZWave server is needed to mediate the ZWave network and communicate with HA. I was able to run an official zwavejs/zwave-js-ui container image, and pass my ZWave USB dongle device through to “/dev/zwave”.

Home Assistant (HA) Smart Home

Hardware Setup #

• 4x Old Dell Optiplex 755 (only one machine necessary)
• Wired ethernet switch to home wireless router and WAN
• SONOFF Zigbee USB Dongle (this one) on one of the machines (only necessary to interact with Zigbee devices)

System Setup #

Each machine has the following:

• Ubuntu Linux 20.04
• Docker (with Swarm Cluster, Docker and Swarm not necessary for HA)
• GlusterFS shared disk across the cluster, not necessary for HA

Home Assistant Docker Setup #

Start from Linux on command line as swarm service (from the machine that has the USB dongle if necessary):