Adding ZWave devices to my Home Assistant smart home

There are some quirks related to running standalone Home Assistant (HA) from a Docker container. I found that the route to enable support and add a device using ZWave is not well documented for this HA configuration, especially for someone new to and unfamiliar with ZWave.

Running ZWave JS server #

My biggest bugaboo was that…

Without a ZWave hub on the network, a standalone ZWave server is needed to mediate the ZWave network and communicate with HA. I was able to run an official zwavejs/zwave-js-ui container image, and pass my ZWave USB dongle device through to “/dev/zwave”.

Installing the new Go-based Fabric LLM cli

Fabric’s installation instructions from its website make it appear that installing this new version rewritten in the Go language should be easier than it was with the original Python implementation.

Although pipx made things relatively easy before, I ran into trouble when my installed version of Go did not meet the requirements of the newer Fabric package.

# Old Python-based implementation
# git clone https://github.com/danielmiessler/fabric.git && # Clone Fabric to your computer
# 	pushd fabric &&
# 	pipx install . &&
# 	exec zsh && fabric --help

# New go version
# Install Fabric directly from the repo

go install github.com/daniel/miessler/fabric@latest

My solution was to try out PKGX which was something that I had been looking for an excuse to try.

"teethis" script is one of the most useful tools I've created

tee is a GNU tool to piggy back stout off of a pipe. The following example shows the basic pattern for using it, where the stout is printed to the terminal and written to a log file.

mycommand | tee mycommand.log

“teethis” script #

I frequently want to run shell scripts where I can see both the stdout and stderr immediately while preserving the output to refer to later. While the tee command to do this is relatively simple, it can be a pain to type over and over again, so I created the following teethis script.