Exaviz released firmware 1.2.0 for the radio on its Cruiser boards on 14 October 2026. It adds a Zigbee mode: the ESP32-C6 module on the board can now be the Zigbee coordinator for Home Assistant, with no USB dongle.
Cruiser is a carrier board for the Raspberry Pi CM5, built to replace a PoE switch, a video recorder and a small server with one box. The full Cruiser has eight Gigabit PoE+ ports sharing a 120 W budget, a 2.5GbE uplink, an M.2 slot and two SATA ports, and lists at $149. Cruiser Lite, with four PoE+ ports, costs $119, and Cruiser Keel, with four Gigabit ports and no PoE, costs $99. The CM5 is sold separately. Zigbee mode works on all three.
Zigbee or Wi-Fi, not both
The ESP32-C6 ships with firmware for 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth LE. The Zigbee firmware replaces it, so Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on the module are off while Zigbee runs, and the board relies on the CM5's own Wi-Fi or a wired port for networking. Switching takes one command:
sudo apt update && sudo apt install exaviz-tools
sudo exaviz-flash zigbee
Zigbee needs exaviz-tools 1.0.21 or newer, and the release post asks for 1.0.22. The board reboots once, finishes on its own in about five minutes and prints the address to enter in Home Assistant, ws://<board address>:9999. sudo exaviz-flash stock brings back the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth firmware.
The board ships without an antenna, and Zigbee needs one. Exaviz specifies a W.FL (MHF III) to RP-SMA pigtail with a 2.4 GHz antenna and warns that the larger U.FL (MHF1) plug will not fit. Without an antenna, the documentation says, the module hears devices poorly and commands time out.
How Home Assistant connects
The radio firmware is only half of it. The Zigbee network is run by a server called exaviz-ziggurat (version 1.0.0) on the CM5. Home Assistant reaches it over the network through ZHA, using the Ziggurat radio type, which is available from Home Assistant 2026.7. Home Assistant does not have to run on the Cruiser itself. Paired devices stay paired across reboots. Exaviz also released version 1.3.1 of its Home Assistant plugin, which has an entity showing whether the Zigbee firmware is installed.
No password on port 9999
The documentation does not soften this: the Zigbee server has no password, and anyone who can reach port 9999 can control the Zigbee network. It refuses public internet addresses but answers every private range, which means every device on your LAN. If Home Assistant runs on the same board, Exaviz recommends limiting the server to loopback with ZIGGURAT_LISTEN=127.0.0.1:9999 in /etc/default/exaviz-ziggurat, followed by a restart. When Home Assistant runs on another machine, the port has to stay open to the LAN, so it is worth keeping the Cruiser on a network segment that untrusted devices cannot reach.