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”.

# Create persistant local storage for zwave
mkdir zwave_store

# Run container
docker run --rm -d \
	--name zwave_js \
	-p 8091:8091 \
	-p 3000:3000 \
	--device=/dev/serial/by-id/usb-Zooz_800_Z-Wave_Stick_533D004242-if00:/dev/zwave \
	-v $(pwd)/zwave_store:/usr/src/app/store \
	zwavejs/zwave-js-ui:latest

The web UI is exposed on port 8091 by default, and HA will communicate with the server over API port 3000.

Enable ZWave integration

To enable ZWave support in HA, add the “Z-Wave” integration and point to the address of the ZWave JS server, including port 3000. This might be different in the case of other HA flavors and setups. I imagine that you can provide the IP to a dedicated ZWave hub here too.

Add a ZWave device

Once HA has added the ZWave server, a new integration labeled “Add Z-Wave device” will become available. Selecting this will provide two options for adding devices. Neither of these worked for me right away in the case of the First Alert smoke alarm I was attempting to add.

I was ultimately able to add the device with some combination of scanning the QR code, either from the HA app or the ZWave JS server UI using my phone and it’s camera. It automatically appeared in both HA and the ZWave server UI once it was officially detected and added to the network.