Uploaded February 2025 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
One of the challenges of running Home Assistant in a virtualized environment is the access to hardware radios. Home Assistant ultimately needs to bridge a ton of home automation networks, and most of these require some sort of USB / Serial dongle. You could have all of your dongles in your server closet and pass them through to the VM/container, but then you can't migrate it across hosts. You could have one dongle for each host, I guess, but that doesn't work for Z-wave where the entire network is stored on the dongle. Plus, the server closet probably isn't a great place for the one radio anyway. So, I'm showing you how I use a Raspberry Pi to run my Zwave and Zigbee radios, remotely, for Home Assistant. This keeps the core Home Assistant setup flexible in where it can run on the network, and also lets me run multiple remote radios without resorting to weird tricks in HA OS.
Blog post with full commands: apalrd.net/posts/2025/ha_zeus
Support me on Ko-Fi if you enjoy my content and find it useful: ko-fi.com/apalrd
Feel free to chat about my upcoming projects on Discord! discord.gg/xJsaEukAr4
Follow me on Mastodon: hachyderm.io/@apalrd
Timestamps:
00:00 - Introduction
00:40 - Hardware
04:42 - Basic Setup
06:08 - Zwave
08:56 - Zigbee
10:39 - Conclusion
#homeassistant #zigbee #zwave #raspberrypi
One of the challenges of running Home Assistant in a virtualized environment is the access to hardware radios. Home Assistant ultimately needs to bridge a ton of home automation networks, and most of these require some sort of USB / Serial dongle. You could have all of your dongles in your server closet and pass them through to the VM/container, but then you can't migrate it across hosts. You could have one dongle for each host, I guess, but that doesn't work for Z-wave where the entire network is stored on the dongle. Plus, the server closet probably isn't a great place for the one radio anyway. So, I'm showing you how I use a Raspberry Pi to run my Zwave and Zigbee radios, remotely, for Home Assistant. This keeps the core Home Assistant setup flexible in where it can run on the network, and also lets me run multiple remote radios without resorting to weird tricks in HA OS.
Blog post with full commands: apalrd.net/posts/2025/ha_zeus
Support me on Ko-Fi if you enjoy my content and find it useful: ko-fi.com/apalrd
Feel free to chat about my upcoming projects on Discord! discord.gg/xJsaEukAr4
Follow me on Mastodon: hachyderm.io/@apalrd
Timestamps:
00:00 - Introduction
00:40 - Hardware
04:42 - Basic Setup
06:08 - Zwave
08:56 - Zigbee
10:39 - Conclusion
#homeassistant #zigbee #zwave #raspberrypi
