I recently migrated one of my home assistant instances from a raspberry pi 4 over to a virtual machine. With this I had the need to "extend" the range for the RFXCom and the old 433Mhz devices that was currently connected to it, without redoing the whole setup. As of writing there is no way to edit this in the user interfaces of Home Assistant.

Steps to setup a ser2net device

I used an old Rasberry Pi3 for this scenario.

Install a basic rasberry pi image and setup the basics like network etc.

Update packages: sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y

Install ser2net: sudo apt install ser2net

Configure ser2net (based on home assistant docs):
nano /etc/ser2net.yaml

connection: &rfxtrx
    accepter: tcp,5000
    enable: on
    options:
      kickolduser: true
      telnet-brk-on-sync: true
    connector: serialdev,
              /dev/ttyUSB0,
              38400n81,local

I had problems that ser2net didn't start as expected after a reboot of the system. So I added this to crontab: @reboot sleep 60 && /etc/init.d/ser2net restart

Checking status of ser2net: /etc/init.d/ser2net status

Steps on homeassistant

  • Create a new full backup your home assistant
  • Install addon called "SSH & Web Terminal", configure it with a username and password. Then start the addon.
  • ssh in to the ip of your home assistant with the username and password you specified in the previous step.
  • Edit the core.config_entries file that is in the /root/config/.storage folder.
    (For example nano /root/config/.storageore.config_entries )
  • Search for rfxtrx
  • Replace the current data section with the one below
      {
        ...
        "data": {
          "host": "10.10.10.12",
          "port": 5000,
          "device": null,
          "automatic_add": false,
          "devices": {
        ...

Links and references

About ser2net and rfxtrx integration