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Use Portable Z-Wave with Power-over-Ethernet

Place ZWA-2 optimally and connect via ethernet

This experiment allows the ZWA-2 to be placed anywhere, and connect via Power-over-Ethernet to your local network to establish a connection with Home Assistant.

Learn more about it in our blog

Follow this tutorial to get started with the portable Z-Wave experiment and a standalone ESP32 PoE module.

Requirements

Note: Once the Waveshare board has Portable Z-Wave installed, the USB port is only able to talk to the ZWA-2. To be able to install software on it again: long press the BOOT button, press RESET at the same time, then release RESET, then release the BOOT button. (Waveshare wiki)

Installation

  1. Make a backup of your Z-Wave network in Home Assistant.
    1. You can do this on the Z-Wave config panel in Home Assistant. Config → Devices & services → Z-Wave → Settings icon.
    2. Download backup is at the bottom of the page.
  2. Make sure the Power-over-Ethernet cable is not connected to the Waveshare board.
  3. Connect the Waveshare board to your computer via USB, click this button and follow the instructions to install:

    Go to Installer

  4. Disconnect the Waveshare board from your computer.
  5. Connect the Waveshare board to the Home Assistant Connect ZWA-2 (note: it needs to run the original firmware!).
  6. Plug in your Ethernet cable into your available Ethernet port with Power-over-Ethernet on one end, and into the Waveshare board on the other end. The light of the ZWA-2 should light up now, to indicate that it received power from the Waveshare board.
  7. This step is for people running a recommended Z-Wave installation:
    (Home Assistant OS with Z-Wave JS add-on managed by the Z-Wave integration)
    1. Open Home Assistant and check for discovered ESPHome devices on the integrations page. Configure the discovered device.
    2. On the same page, once ESPHome has been configured, look for the discovered Z-Wave device. Configure it
  8. This step is for other installation methods:
    (if you are managing your own Z-Wave JS server)
    1. Find the IP address of the Waveshare board on your network.
    2. Configure the Z-Wave JS Server to use the following serial port: esphome://WAVESHARE-BOARD-IP. Replace WAVESHARE-BOARD-IP with the IP address of your Waveshare board. If the IP address of your Waveshare board is 192.168.1.100, the serial port would be esphome://192.168.1.100.

      Note: this is for the configuration of the Z-Wave JS Server, not inside Home Assistant!
  9. If you have moved the ZWA-2 to a different location, go to the Z-Wave config panel in Home Assistant and hit rebuild network routes.
  10. Enjoy!

Troubleshooting

Make sure the Waveshare ESP32-PoE board is connected to the same network as Home Assistant.

Make sure you configure both the discovered Waveshare ESP32-PoE ESPHome and Z-Wave configurations in Home Assistant.

If Home Assistant is connected and you are not able to see your Z-Wave devices, restore the backup.

  1. You can do this on the Z-Wave config panel in Home Assistant. Config → Devices & services → Z-Wave → Settings icon.
  2. Restore backup is at the bottom of the page.

If you are unable to get it to work, revert back to the original firmware and connect the ZWA-2 directly to Home Assistant.

If you want to further customize the ESPHome-based portable Z-Wave firmware that runs on the ZWA-2, you can adopt it inside ESPHome Device Builder. To ensure it continues to work, after adoption, you have to edit the generated YAML and remove the encryption and key sections under api:. Z-Wave JS does not currently support ESPHome encryption and the Z-Wave serial protocol has their own encryption mechanism.