USB Passthrough: Zigbee/Z-Wave/Matter for Home Assistant

Apps and Virtualization
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Hello, I’m trying to figure this out and I’ve only found one tutorial/guide/forum post with good info anywhere about this after hours of searching. To start I will give specs:

Intel i5 12600K
ASRock H670M-ITX mobo
32GB RAM (Teamgroup T-Create)
3x 4TB IronWolf drives in RAIDZ1
SONOFF Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus-E

I am trying to get the Zigbee USB hub to work with the Home Assistant app (or even a VM running HA). The ONLY guide I’ve found, including searching the several existing Reddit posts with unclear answers and TrueNAS documentation, is this video:

How to Install Home Assistant Supervised on TrueNAS Scale with working ConBee II/SONOFF Zigbee Stick

In his video, he creates a VM running Debian to install HA on, instead of using the app. I would like to keep this simple as possible as I’m obviously not good at much of this. Is this the best known way of doing this? If there is a way to pass only my Sonoff USB hub to the App version of HA that would be nice, though I’m not opposed to creating a VM if that’s the best way. I have also found that several people just gave up and purchased a PCIe device for this… which is not an option for me (I do not have any free PCIe slots).

I need to know if it’s even possible to pass through a SINGLE USB device rather than the controller or a PCIe device. I can’t sacrifice every single USB port on my system to Home Assistant if I won’t be able to pass any through to other VM’s/apps.

I see the option in the app settings for “devices,” however I cannot find info on exactly how to figure out what to type in those fields, or if that’s even the correct way to do it:

TrueNAS Devices
TrueNAS Devices998×418 32.9 KB

Can anyone help me with a solution, perhaps how to figure out exactly what to put in those fields, and if there’s anything else I need to do to pass through a single USB dongle? I find it hard to believe that there isn’t more info I could find about this process, given how many people in the home lab/home server hobby are also into home automation and HA, and therefore Zigbee/Z-Wave/Matter devices…

I apologize if I’ve missed something on the forums, I have searched. Thank you!

-Jacob

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I was able to install HAOS in a Linux VM and successfully pass through my Sonoff Zigbee USB 3.0 Hub. The only setting that was confusing was the “controller type” box in the Devices menu, for which I selected qemu-xhci. I don’t have a clue what this option means or does, but it worked for me.

This solution is actually better than the app because the app version wasn’t able to make use of all of my backup file, addons and a few other things would not transfer over. This isn’t an issue with the VM install. Here is the guide I followed:

Installing HAOS in a VM on TrueNAS SCALE

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This is certainly possible when using a VM, or running in Docker. But I do not use, and I do not recommend the TrueNAS “app” for Home Assistant.

If you’re going to use a VM, I’d run HAOS. There’s no longer a need for using a VM to run docker. Just so you are aware, if you want the convenience of using add-ons, HAOS is the only option.

If you do not want to use HAOS, use docker-compose. You can set Home Assistant up as a custom app or run dockage and drop your compose file in there. You can pass a single USB device to Home Assistant using the standard docker-compose passthrough method.