Z-Wave JS UI standalone server on a Raspberry Pi or Linux computer

Instead of buying  a new Z-Way adapter I thought it would be a nice project to reuse the almost 10 year old RaZberry 2(RZ) adapter together with a Raspberry Pi 2(RPi). 

After some Googling I found Z-Wave JS UI(ZUI) which is both the server part and an UI.

The described installation could be used for almost "any" Z-way interface, impressing list !, and for "any" Linux distribution.

Introduction
The ZUI installation is going to be used together with Home Assistant(HA) which will be described in a coming post.

Other integrations besides HA are found here.

If you have the Z-wave adapter on the same hardware as the HA installation just go for the setup here.

Prerequisites 

You need a Linux machine with some Linux OS + the Z-way interface

Detect the hardware

After connecting the RZ adapter, or a USB dongle, it will probably appear as something like "/dev/ttyXX". Check with "dmesg | grep tty"

RaZberry card

My HA installation is running on a Mac with Linux KVM so I have to use the ZUI standalone since the RZ adapter is made for the RPi GPIO header. After some tinkering with the above mentioned hardware it worked.

Per default the RX/TX pins, on any Raspberry Pi, are setup as a serial console. This means that you can use a USB console cable to log on from almost any computer, which have an USB port, to the RPi. Since the RZC is using the same pins we have to disable the console function with 

sudo rasp-config

3. Interface options => 

    I6 Serial Port Enable/disable shell messages on serial connection

    

    Would you like a login shell to be accessible over serial? => No

    Would you like the serial port hardware to be enabled? => Yes

    The serial login shell is disabled

    The serial interface is enabled  => OK

Do a restart "sudo reboot now" and check "dmesg | grep tty".

Install Z-Wave JS UI

Docker seems to be the prefered method, not my "standard" 😉, but here I'm using the NPM method.

Via ssh/terminal start with an update

sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade -y && sudo apt clean
and then install Node.js(V22 LTS) and NPM 

curl -fsSL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_22.x | sudo -E bash -

sudo apt install -y nodejs 

sudo npm install -g npm@latest

and check the install with "node -v && npm -v".

Then the actual application "sudo npm install -g zwave-js-ui",  start with "sudo zwave-js-ui" and check at "http://your_host.local:8091".

Autostart

Autostart with systemd, the "standard" Linux method, will make ZUI application start at boot and restart if it fails.

Please note that the "ExecStart" row is using an environment variable which configures a custom storage path where the settings are stored. If not used, the settings will be lost on updates.

Create a file with
sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/zwave.service
and add the following configuration??
[Unit]

Description=Z-way application
After=syslog.target network-online.target
[Service]
Type=simple
User=root
ExecStart=STORE_DIR=~/.zwave-js-ui zwave-js-ui
Restart=always
RestartSec=10
KillMode=process
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Use then the following commands to get it up and running

sudo systemctl daemon-reload && sudo systemctl enable zway

Created symlink /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/zway.service → /etc/systemd/system/zway.service.

sudo systemctl start zway

Check with "sudo systemctl status zway"

If You have problems and would like to clean up, use the following commands 

sudo systemctl stop zway && sudo systemctl disable zway

and then delete the ”zway.service” file.

Settings

In the ZUI WEB interface select your hardware integration and proceed.