Home Assistant, Raspberry Pi and Z-Wave

Home automation via the Z-Wave protocol with Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi 5.

Why Z-Wave?

For reasons of energy efficiency, WiFi is not an option for me. That leaves Bluetooth, Zigbee, Z-Wave, and various proprietary protocols. Zigbee has the advantage of being widely used and having a large selection of compatible devices. However, I chose Z-Wave for the following reasons:

• Greater range due to its lower frequency (868 MHz in Europe)
• Less interference since it does not overlap with WiFi or Bluetooth
• Better cross-manufacturer standardization, meaning devices from different brands should work together more reliabl
• Optimized for battery-powered devices, often resulting in lower power consumption compared to Zigbee

Hardware

As a hardware platform, I chose a Raspberry Pi 5 with 8 GB RAM and a 64 GB SD card. Additional hardware is required for the Z-Wave radio interface. Here, I use a RaZberry 7 Pro with an external antenna. The whole setup is housed in a KKSB case, which provides enough space for the Z-Wave HAT and to mount the external antenna.

Home Assistant

The installation of Home Assistant and, in particular, the setup of the Z-Wave module did not work right away. This was mainly due to the fact that much of the documentation is only available for the Raspberry Pi 4.

Therefore, I have described the installation on a separate page.

The Result