I have a small Gigabyte Core i7 mini-PC running HomeAssistant underneath Proxmox hypervisor so that it can support local text to speech and speech recognition with Assist. So not having any internal slots for the device I decided to give this external 4G LTE Industrial Mini PCIe to USB Adapter Enclosure a try, and it worked very well! Simply replace the SMA with RP-SMA to Fl cables that were included with my module (or you can buy them) and connect the Z-Wave and Zigbee antennas to the two ports. USB-C to the computer, I poked a USB hole through for the “USB Dual_Serial” to homeassistant and viola, HASS found the device on a VM reboot.
The only device I have set up so far is the U-TEC U-Bolt Pro Z-Wave Smart Lock and it was fairly easy to set up. It even was able to update the Z-Wave firmware in the deadbolt remotely!
I didn’t have to do anything manually I just plugged it in and HASS worked. I followed directions for the Raspberry Pi with HASS which are identical since I am using a USB port.
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After adding some ZigBee devices, It didn’t take long for me to realize that the official Zigbee stack in HomeAssistant is not very useful since most of the end devices have a Zigbee2MQTT plugin to access otherwise unexposed features of those devices. For some reason it was initially giving errors that lead me nowhere, but went away when I re-flashed the Zigbee firmware Zigbee_v1.0.0.gbl onto the mixtile board from Mixtile-EDGE2-Firmware/Zigbee&Thread at main · focalcrest/Mixtile-EDGE2-Firmware · GitHub into the Mixtile using the universal-silabs-flasher from Advanced command line because currently the Mixtile Addon to flash devices has a bug that I found in the script. If anybody is trying to get this to work it should save you a few hours!
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I use the same mpcie to usb adapter on mine. Works well, as you stated.
That said, my zwave network is much larger (100+ devices) and locks up frequently on the shipped 7.21 firmware. Hopefully they will provide us a 7.22.1 based firmware soon, as it drastically reduces those jammed events (at least it does on the other 800 series controllers I’ve installed it on).
I wish the device just used standard SiLabs firmware so we could just flash the generic firmware, and not have to rely on Mixtile to give us updates.
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100 devices? have you thought about setting up maybe a couple more z-wave controllers to segment out the network a little bit? Like one per floor or something. Its possible to connect to them remotely through tcp/ip socket
That’s usually not a good idea with non-Zwave LR devices, it just makes the mesh weaker overall and causes radio interference/bandwidth contention.
It’s mostly a moot point after one gets to firmware 7.22.1, so no big deal. I’ll just need to be patient until mixtile gets to it.
