homeassistant

Hello Lemmings.

This is something I've been thinking about for a while; basically, I want to move my zwave node away from my main HomeAssistant system.

I'll try to be brief; my current config is a single mini/micro system (Dell, I believe), Core i5, 8G RAM and an SSD, it's a ton of power for HA and massive overkill, I know. The problem is that the system is located in a remote room of the house, so the signal isn't exactly the best and I have some nodes that are linked through 2-3 other devices; I'd like to move the USB Z-stick to a more central location, and I don't think a USB extension is going to cut it. I have ethernet wire which is far more viable to get a connection across to the HA computer. I don't want to move the HA computer away from where it is, since there's backup power where it is; so my idea would be to use something like a Raspberry Pi (now that availability seems to be improving), connected by Ethernet using PoE (for power availability from the UPS). Provided I can get a Raspberry Pi, and all the related and required parts together, which should be fairly trivial; how would I connect the zwave dongle on the Raspberry Pi to the computer running homeassistant?

I haven't considered this before due to the pi being so difficult to get since I put together the homeassistant system. Ideally, I would want several of these systems placed at key points around the house so that I wouldn't need any of the zwave nodes to relay communications, but that's future plans more than anything - I would need to source several zwave dongles and get them all on raspberry pi's and get them working together.... So going about it towards that end would be a bonus; but at least I want to do some research on it and figure out if I can even relocate the dongle at all first. Any infromation to that end is appreciated.

I'm currently using ZWaveJS UI.