[Custom integration] Bluetooth Mesh lighting (Häfele Connect Mesh / ThingOS) — no vendor gateway, uses your ESPHome proxies

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Bluetooth Mesh lighting in Home Assistant — no vendor gateway

Home Assistant has no native Bluetooth SIG Mesh support, which strands whole

families of “app-only” mesh lights — including Häfele Connect Mesh (Loox)

and other ThingOS-based luminaires. The usual options are a discontinued

vendor gateway, or an experimental BlueZ bluetooth-meshd setup that won’t run

on Home Assistant OS.

So I built a small pure-Python Bluetooth Mesh stack plus a **HACS custom

integration** that drives these lamps directly — **using the ESPHome Bluetooth

proxies you probably already have** (or a local adapter). No extra hardware, no

meshd, works on HA OS in a VM with no local radio.

:backhand_index_pointing_right: Repo: GitHub - dasimon135/ha-bluetooth-mesh: Control Bluetooth SIG Mesh lighting (Häfele Connect Mesh / ThingOS) from Home Assistant — pure-Python mesh stack + HACS integration, via your ESPHome Bluetooth proxies. No vendor gateway. · GitHub

How it works

The vendor app exports its network as a .connect file (NetKey, AppKey, node

addresses). The integration imports it, connects a proxy to the same

network, and sends standard, app-keyed SIG mesh messages (Generic OnOff,

Light Lightness, Light CTL). One GATT connection to any one powered lamp reaches

the whole mesh — the network relays the rest.

It’s validated end-to-end on real hardware: a Häfele tunable-white lamp

controlled from HA through an ESPHome proxy, with a kept-alive connection that

makes commands feel instant.

What works today

  • On/off, brightness, and colour temperature (tunable white), one HA

light per node.

  • Instant response (the proxy connection is kept alive; configurable timeout if

you also want to keep using the vendor app — a mesh node has a single proxy

slot).

Honest limitations

  • No RGB / full-colour yet: my hardware is tunable-white only, so I left

colour unimplemented rather than ship it untested. **If you have a colour mesh

lamp and want to help validate, please shout** — it’s a clean addition.

  • Optimistic state: parallel changes from the vendor app aren’t read back until

HA’s next command.

Install

HACS → custom repository (category Integration) → install → restart → add the

integration and paste your .connect export. Details and screenshots in the

README.

Feedback, testers, and issues welcome — especially anyone with ThingOS-based

lights that aren’t Häfele, or colour hardware. :folded_hands: