molten tide
Hi all! I'm brand new to home assistant, and looking forward to the rabbit hole! But....I'm having trouble with my z-wave configuration.
Short version because my detailed version is too long for the post (I'll put more details in the comments): I have a Synology NAS with Home Assistant installed on it in a container, and trying to figure out the best way to integrate z-wave functionality, so far looking at a couple of z-wave sticks and z-wave js as possibilities.
I'm not brand new to z-wave and home automation, but shortly after getting started, I took a break for a few years because of life (which included a move). Recently, I got a new z-wave lock (kwikset) which was installed today, and is working perfectly, except for being added to our smart home system. I currently have one z-wave hub, the abode legacy gateway, which is apparently not compatible with the lock, and I think the firmware upgrades on it didn't make it up to the current z-wave standards. So....I could upgrade the hub (which still might not work since the lock isn't on their compatibility list), or I could create my own hub and ecosystem and have some more choices regarding what I want to use where (guess which way I'm leaning). Either way, I'm kinda starting over. I'm good at following instructions if they're laid out for me, but not so good at inventing code for programming, and cheap is good, free is better (money's a bit tight right now, so I'm willing to learn from tutorials to save a bit).
So I've found the aeotec z-stick 7 plus, which looks good, and the homeseer smartstick g8 z-wave plus (the homeseer one is the newer standard, correct? Is it automatically backwards compatible with the older ones?), but I'm not 100% sure I understand how they work. I'm hoping to be able to plug them into a computer to create a z-wave hub, but if I understand correctly, it isn't just plug-and-play, where it would instantly create a z-wave network when I plug it in, correct? I'd need to set it up with some software? Which Home Assistant is supposed to work with either. I currently have home assistant set up in a container on my synology NAS, which is ideally where I'd like to host everything, but.....apparently Synology DSM 7 onwards has removed the NAS's ability to recognize certain USB functionality? Aside from just a hard drive to read? So I can't just plug the usb stick into the NAS either - I think there's some coding workaround in order to get the NAS to recognize the z-wave hub functionality of the USB stick.
And then there's z-wave js, which I think sounds like the solution for installing z-wave on my NAS....but I still need the stick/hardware, right? Or can I avoid buying new hardware entirely? Apologies for the rambling - this is basically where my research has brought me and I need help to get pointed in the right direction to move forward.
cold skiff
Try docs and see if you have any further questions. https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/zwave_js/