What I found so far is the BI supports MQTT, so maybe this combined with something like a Homeseer PI would be a good way to be able to control ZWave devices?
That's really the crux of it. The home automation software handles the management of the Z-Wave devices and provides a mechanism
for automating control of those devices when events occur. MQTT allows other software, such as
Blue Iris, a straightforward way to
send those events to the home automation software.
There are several good home automation packages, and the choice on which one to implement often comes down to the degree of
complexity and configuration the user wants. I use Home Assistant, Blue Iris, and MQTT and it all works well. I am
happy to provide details on my hardware and software, but I don't want to bore anybody (further), so, I will include a couple of screenshots,
that might make the process a little more tangible.
Blue Iris as an MQTT client pushes a message to the MQTT broker with a topic and payload - in this case, my
"driveway_right" camera. Note that the
text for the MQTT topic and payload is just something I made up, but it has to
be formatted with slashes as shown (that's not entirely accurate - you could just subscribe to something like "blue_iris" to receive
all events, but you would have no idea which camera or device sent the message.)
Camera Settings--> Trigger--> Immediate actions...--> Web request or MQTT:
And similar to the Homeseer 3 screenshot above, Home Assistant provides something called an "Automation" which has Triggers, Conditions, and Actions.
A "Trigger" can be an MQTT message:
and then an "Action" (turn on a Z-Wave switch in this case):
It can get complicated pretty quickly if you want, with various conditions, multiple areas, devices, and entities, but hopefully this helps.
