Z-NET PRO Integration with openHAB
Use this guide to configure your openHAB hub to work with the Z-NET PRO Z-Wave & Zigbee network interface.
Overview
Z-NET PRO is a network-connected interface that’s designed to send and receive wireless commands to and from Z-Wave and Zigbee smart home devices. This guide will cover the steps required to use Z-NET PRO with openHAB’s native Z-Wave & Zigbee integrations and with MQTT.
Initial Setup
This guide requires your Z-NET PRO to be initialized and connected to your home’s local area network (LAN). If you’ve not already done this, please refer to the Quick Start Guide for instructions.
The following assumes familiarity with openHAB and it’s concepts. If you are new to openHAB, please review the Getting Started Tutorial which provides detailed instructions and examples covering how to achieve the steps outlined below.
Approach 1. Using the Native Z-Wave & Zigbee Add-ons
Z-Wave
Install the Z-Wave add-on. Create a Z-Wave Controller Thing and use tcp://<ip address of Z-Net PRO>:2001 as the Serial Port.
Devices already paired with the controller will be discovered and Things created and put in the inbox automatically.
New devices can be added by navigating to MainUI → Settings → Things → + → Z-Wave. This puts the controller into pairing mode. Take what ever action on the device needed to pair it with the controller. A new Thing will appear which can be accepted. See ZWave - Bindings | openHAB for details.
Zigbee
Install the Zigbee binding and create a new Zigbee Ember Coordinator Thing with tcp://<ip address of Z-Net>:2002 as the Serial Port, 115200 as the baud, and flow control set to None.
Unlike Z-Wave, the paired devices do not live on the coordinator so you’ll need to use the same approach as outlined above to add a new Z-Wave device using the Zigbee binding instead (i.e. go to Settings → Things → + → Zigbee and then take the action on the device to pair). See Zigbee - Bindings | openHAB for details.
A note about support for devices:
Z-Wave: All Z-Wave devices can be supported. However, the openHAB binding depends on a database so if a device appears as “Unknown” (for battery devices it may require waking the device up a few times) it may need to be added to the database. Instructions are in the Z-Wave binding docs.
Zigbee: Many vendors do not provide pure Zigbee commands but have Zigbee plus additional proprietary commands. openHAB may or may not be compatible with the proprietary commands. The Zigbee binding will support any device with the Zigbee logo. But for devices that are not Zigbee 3.0 certified, YMMV.
Approach 2. Using Z-Wave JS and the Z-Wave JS Binding and Zigbee2MQTT and the MQTT binding
See Z-Wave JS - Bindings | openHAB for details. Those running openHABian may have an option to install Z-Wave JS from openHABian-config. Others will need to install it manually.
Create the Z-Wave JS Bridge Thing with the network address and port and such for the Z-Wave JS web socket. All the paired devices should be automatically discovered and put into the Inbox.
Zigbee2MQTT is pretty popular because it’s better able to keep up with all the Zigbee plus proprietary devices out there. There seems to be two ways users integrate openHAB with it. Since Zigbee2MQTT supports the Home Assistant MQTT discovery standard some users use the HomeAssistant add-on (see Home Assistant - Bindings | openHAB) which, once connected to the same broker as Zigbee2MQTT openHAB will discover all the HA advertised devices and add them to the Inbox automatically. Sometimes though the HA discovery doesn’t work optimally so some users manually configure the MQTT with the second approach. The second approach is to use the MQTT binding and Generic MQTT Things to manually configure the Things. This means manually configuring the subscription and command topics and transformations from/to JSON as appropriate.
The second approach is clearly more work overall but gives the user much more fine control.
Many thanks to openHAB foundation member Richard Koshak for his assistance with this doc. Please visit the openHAB community forum for help and assistance with openHAB Z-Wave & Zigbee integrations.