I migrated from another ZwaveMe product to the ZWA-2 (which was a firmware related headache to get my network out of the ZwaveMe one onto it but fortunately finally got it resolved) on a QEMU machine under Incus with no problems but I understand the desire, and the ZWA-2 has been rock solid.

Have you seen this (experimental) project

https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2025/10/13/portable-z-wave-with-wifi-and-poe/

I’ve not dug into it much other than being aware of it, but conceptually don’t see why it, or potentially one also leveraging a ZBT-1 or -2 couldn’t also be possible, if you’re prepared to tinker.

Good workaround, thanks!

Yes that is correct I have a VPN connection available to my house on my UK internet connection for selfhosted services and a separate commercial VPN available from a major provider which I can use to route via a different country but I don’t believe I can easily have them both connected at the same time nor do I really want to always route all of my traffic overseas to work around a minor part my online experience

If you expect it to be flaky you could get one of those old school mechanical time switches with the clicky pegs (or a more modern digital equivalent) and just have it set to power down for 1 click, normally 15 mins, at 4am or whenever suits you - minimally technically complicated and guaranteed stability through planned instability!

Thanks for the recommendation, will give that a further look.

I have played with Pinchflat as mentioned by another poster. I’ve found that some of the ones that aren’t on YouTube, you can use AudioBookShelf or similar in conjunction with a vpn set to a non core country for the podcast, you can either remove or at least greatly reduce the ad inserts.

Have an experiment with that, I use a gluetun docker and link my ABS docker to that.

Its certainly doable, you just need to decide on where you want to start as a minimum viable product and tinker along as you go but ideally think far enough ahead about ideal situation so you don’t paint yourself into a corner and have to restart from scratch to get a certain outcome, although the Pi is pretty flexible for the power you’ll need.

I did this around 20 years ago (obviously not with a Pi back then) but as things changed I came round to the less hassle option of a phone and Bluetooth, particularly as I was often driving cars I couldn’t tinker with too much.

I had an implementation with a fold out 1 DIN touch screen which replaced the stereo and handled audio amplification etc and one with a stand alone hot plug 7" touchscreen. I had a reserve battery so that it stayed powered up for a short period of time after parking at home to do playlist and podcast synchronisation to my server in the house.

As other people have mentioned I was using Kodi and running audio from it as well as satnav etc. Mp3car was a good resource at the time.

Do you use docker for anything else self hosted? You should give it a try. I literally had not heard of grocy till I read your post but I self host other things with docker. I googled them, visited their github looked at their docker instructions - theirs downloading a docker compose file and lsio’s which gave a run option rather than compose.

I pulled up an ssh to my server from my phone and literally entered the run command from here just modified to have my preferred storage path.

docker run -d \
  --name=grocy \
  -e PUID=1000 \
  -e PGID=1000 \
  -e TZ=Etc/UTC \
  -p 9283:80 \
  -v ~/.config/grocy:/config \
  --restart unless-stopped \
  lscr.io/linuxserver/grocy:latest```

I then opened my browser to http://ip:9283 and was prompted with a username and password. I googled and found out the default is admin/admin. I now have grocy temporarily running on my server. If I want to run it permanently I'd include it in my existing docker-compose stack or create a new one with just it in it. 

I understand it's frustrating and you may not want to use grocy after all and someone might have a good alternative, but getting to terms with docker will make your self hosting life much easier - it took me longer to type this post than it took me to get grocy up and running with docker.