I posted in this thread over a year ago looking for advice, so many thanks to everyone who provided guidance! I finally got around to setting up HA and adding a couple Level Locks, so in the spirit of trying to give back, here’s my experience if it helps anyone:
I’m running HA on a Pi 4, and my original plan was to use the Pi’s BT radio, since my IT closet where it sits is just on the other side of the hall from the door. Once I put the battery in the lock and went to “add Homekit device” in HA, it was able to detect it. It turns out, however, that this is NOT the right way to do it, because you can’t pair it to the Level app (which is required for a lot of additional functionality, firmware updates, etc.). So, I factory reset it, set it up first with the Level app, updated the firmware, and THEN went and paired it up to HA. That worked perfectly, and now I can control it via the Level app and HA.
Note: the locks themselves will continue broadcasting their availability over Bluetooth for 10 minutes after you power them up, so if you wait longer than that, you need to either go into the app and tell it you want to connect it to HomeKit or pull the battery, but if you do it within 10 minutes, HA will sync up right away even if you don’t go through the “add to HomeKit” flow in the app.
Unfortunately, the lock was very unstable. It’d often drop offline, the response was incredibly slow, etc. just like a lot of the complaints here. I grabbed an ESP32 board off of Amazon, flashed it with the BT Proxy firmware, put it in the same room as the lock. It definitely worked better, but it still was a bit glitchy. I then disabled the Pi’s internal BT, and it started to work perfectly: no drops, no glitches, almost instantaneous responses both to commands and state changes.
It worked so well I got another one for our front door (all the way on the other side of the house) as well as another BT proxy board. Just for the heck of it, I didn’t bother trying to pair it using the Pi’s radio and just brought the proxy online, and it worked perfectly. So it seems like the newer ESP32 firmware does indeed allow pairing.
On the negative side, I don’t think the Level Bolts themselves are very good devices. They’re expensive and required grinding down some bits of my old locks to get them to fit. The Level App itself is garbage—slow, unreliable, and even basic stuff like firmware updates takes several tries to get to work. The locks are underpowered and jam unless everything is absolutely perfect; I spent a hell of a lot of time repositioning strike plates and chiseling my door frames. The locks sometimes cycle properly mechanically but “think” they’re jammed and make the stupid “blip boop” sound and report “jammed” back to HA. Unfortunately, they’re the only option for something that looks good with our existing door harware, so I’ve just resigned myself to tolerating it (and, because HA is so wonderfully flexible, I have deployed some software solutions, like an automation that waits to check if they’re actually locked, and if not, first tries unlocking and relocking, and then notifies me if it’s still not locked; 99% of the time, the unlock/relock loop solves the problem).
The good part is that they really do work perfectly with HA and the BT proxies. While the app is sluggish and unreliable, I’ve never had trouble with HA. As long as I interact with them exclusively over HA, I’ve been pretty happy. Don’t bother with their bugged auto lock/unlock nonsense; just build automations in HA and let it do the hard work.
I haven’t tried upgrading to Matter (and I think I may have missed their stupid window anyway), mainly because I don’t currently have a Thread radio in my setup. They also work so well with the BT proxies (from a connectivity perspective) that I also don’t want to screw things up. Given my generally low opinion of Level-the-company and their buggy software, I’m worried that a one-way upgrade could screw it all up.
Thus endeth my story.