Configuring Yale Access Bluetooth Integration

Configuration
35

Hi all.

I bought a Yale Unity Screen Door Lock yesterday and after reading some community posts, ended up doing these steps to set it up.

By the way, as the name suggests, it’s for screen door (mesh or flyscreen door) - at least it was my case!

  1. Installed the physical lock - was an easy one to one replacement for me. No drilling, cutting, hammering etc etc.
    1.1. The difficult part was being careful with top cable not be pinched by the lock parts.
  2. Inserted the batteries.
  3. Installed the Yale Home app on Android
    3.1. Made a [primary] user (as owner) and added the lock to the app.
    3.2. App started updating the lock without giving me another option.
    3.3. [Fault] It got stuck in update loop forever (from 0% to 100% over and over)
    3.4. Removed the batteries and reinstalled them - same annoying update loop behaviour.
    3.5. Found the reset button on the lock (in the upper battery box). While the batteries were in, pressed the reset button (on the physical lock) for a couple of seconds to reset.
    3.6. Opened the app again and it updated again (twice this time) and finally it started working on the app.
    3.7. Added two more users (both as owners). [Optional] Also added the provided key-tags to two of the existing accounts.
  4. Started Home Assistant Yale Access Bluetooth integration → No Device Found.
    4.1. Even though my HA Bluetooth dongle was less than 8-10 meters away from the lock it couldn’t find it.
  5. Flashed an ESP32 with Bluetooth Proxy.
    5.1. And put the proxy close to the lock (around 2-3 meters away).
    5.2. Immediately the lock popped up (auto-discover) in HA integration page. I left it as it is, since it was asking for a key.
  6. Added August integration to HA with these options:
  • Yale Home
  • user: email of one of the accounts that I added on step 3.7.
  • and also entered the password!
    6.1. Note that I didn’t install the August app (on my phone) at all. Just simply added the integration.
    6.2. Based on the HA documentations, this August integration is supposed to get the key from the lock automatically.
    6.3. Now that August integration is installed, no device or entity will pop up there. Only shows the email that I provided.
  1. Back to Yale Access Bluetooth (which was auto discovered in step 5.2.)
    7.1. This time it didn’t ask for a key - I suppose internally it talked to August integration and got the key from there.
    7.2. Finally the lock is added to HA.
    7.3. It shows a lock entity (locked/unlocked), a door open/close sensor, battery % and voltage, and signal strength.
    7.4. The same as my other lock (from another brand), unfortunately, the access log that is shown on the Yale Home app (saying who opened the door and with a tag or app etc.) is not integrated to HA.
    7.5. With my ESP32 (Wemos d1-mini-pro) which has a small onboard antenna (not that the others have any better on-board antennas), signal strength is -97dB being 2 meters away, which is awfully low. I should mention that there’s a wooden front-door between the screen door and the ESP32. But I expected more. I think the lock’s BT transmitter is very weak unfortunately. When I open the front-door (not the front-screen-door) the signal boosts +3dB which is still low.
    7.6. The lock is very responsive and quickly updates its status on HA. Even when I open/close the door physically or lock the door with physical button on the lock.
  2. I have to see if the bluetooth connection is always on or not so I could manage the lock battery. On the Yale integration (by pressing the configure button) it shows that by default it is not always connected. Which is a good news since everything is working fast.

I hope it helps someone.
If anything else happened after using it for a while, I will try to update this post.