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”.

Quickly Set Up Guacamole Using Docker

Apache Guacamole is a clientless remote desktop gateway. It supports standard protocols like VNC, RDP, and SSH.

Thanks to HTML5, once Guacamole is installed on a server, all you need to access your desktops is a web browser.

The Guacamole manual can be found here, but because the project is broken into 2 or more peices, it can take a bit of poking around and toggling between sections to find the exact steps one needs to quickly get up and running from scratch using Docker.