Hey all.
I've had an Ultraloq U-Bolt for several years now. It used to be tied into my Home Assistant via Samsung SmartThings and was very reliable. Recently, Ultraloq rebranded to Xthings and it's become kind of a mess since then. I had to stop using it through SmartThings because it's API would constantly disconnect and require me to authenticate randomly. Then I found out that Xthings finally added their own native HA integration. The problem is that after setting that up, the lock doesn't reliably report its status anymore. It will often show as locked or unlocked when it's the opposite, breaking conditions for automations it's attached to. The only way I can fix this is to run the native Xthings app and trigger a lock/unlock action there, which will whack the status reporting back into place briefly, then it'll break again.
I've completely removed and re-added the lock and Xthings automation multiple times to no avail. I haven't reached out to Xthings yet, but in past times when I have about home HA related things, they just go "Third-party product we support as a courtesy, can't help you."
Has anyone else run into this and figured out a way around it?
Thanks!
I decided to email Xthings again and their excuse for support said that “this model doesn’t support Home Assitant”, despite it working for years through SmartThings before and their own integration working with it, though improperly. Don’t support this company, they’ve fully enshittified and beyond that, seem to now be trying to be a competitor to Flock. I won’t be doing business with them again.
An awesome community member has written their own integration: GitHub - inventor7777/ultraloq-ble-ha: Upgraded Ultraloq BLE (local) Integration for Home Assistant, with support for U-Bolt Pro · GitHub
It unfortunately requires an ESP32 Bluetooth Proxy and can’t work with the official Ultraloq wi-fi bridge. I purchased a Seeed Studio W5500, flashed it to be a proxy and my U-Bolt now works perfectly with Home Assistant again. The only downside is triggered lock actions are slower now (up to 20 seconds, though usually) less which the dev says is just due to limitations of this method. But it’s more than good enough for me.
Insane I had to spent $50 to restore functionality the lock had for years but like I said, don’t support Xthings. For now though, this is a great alternative.