Yale Home - Integration help

Third party integrations
1

Hi all,

I’m trying to get a Yale Smart Video Doorbell working with the Home Assistant Yale Home integration.

Home Assistant
Installation: Home Assistant OS
Core: 2026.7.2
Supervisor: 2026.07.3
Operating System: 18.1
Frontend: 20260624.5

Just a weeks old installation with only a few Zigbee devices added and no automations yet.

Yale
Yale Home integration (built-in)
Yale Home Mobile App: 2026.7.0
Yale Smart Video Doorbell (eagle_doorbell), 2.4GHz Wi-Fi
Doorbell firmware: 1.7.3-D6+20260213075301

The integration appears to connect correctly:

  • Login succeeds.
  • Initial synchronization completes successfully.
  • Device information is populated correctly.
  • Battery level is retrieved and continues to update correctly.
  • The latest (or sometimes an older/random) doorbell snapshot/image is downloaded when Home Assistant starts or the integration is reloaded.
  • The latest (or sometimes older/random) Motion and Ding events are loaded into Home Assistant when the integration starts or is reloaded.
  • Occasionally, some (but not all) Motion/Ding events appear in Home Assistant several hours later without reloading the integration.
  • WebSocket / PubNub connection is established.
  • DoorbellMotionActivity and DoorbellDingActivity are received in the debug logs whenever motion is detected or the doorbell button is pressed.
  • The timestamps of these activities match the actual motion and doorbell events.
  • My Yale Smart Door Handles that are connected through Yale ConnectX work perfectly through the same Yale Home integration.

This suggests that authentication, Yale Cloud communication, realtime communication and the initial synchronization are all working correctly.

However, the doorbell entities never change state after the initial synchronization:

  • binary_sensor.*_motion never turns ON.
  • binary_sensor.*_ding never turns ON.
  • Image Capture is never triggered.
  • last_changed on these entities never updates.

The image entity downloads the latest snapshot when the integration starts or is reloaded, but no new images are retrieved after subsequent motion or doorbell events.

So the cloud activity clearly reaches Home Assistant, but the entity state is never updated after the corresponding realtime activity is received.

I have already:

  • Removed and re-added the integration.
  • Reloaded the integration.
  • Restarted Home Assistant.
  • Verified that the doorbell works correctly in the Yale Home app.
  • Enabled debug logging and confirmed that DoorbellMotionActivity and DoorbellDingActivity are received every time the corresponding events occur.
  • Verified that battery status continues to update correctly.
  • Verified that the latest image is downloaded during integration startup/reload.
  • Verified that Yale Smart Door Handles work correctly through the same Yale Home integration.
  • Performed code-level troubleshooting by tracing the realtime event flow through the Yale integration, following packets, activity objects and value translations between the Yale realtime feed, the underlying yalexs library and the Home Assistant Yale Home integration. I was able to follow the communication through each stage without identifying any obvious failures or missing events that would explain why the corresponding Home Assistant entities never change state.

Because the initial synchronization works correctly, battery status continues to update, realtime activities are consistently received, and other Yale devices function normally through the same Yale Home integration, this suggests that the failure occurs specifically when these doorbell activities should update the corresponding Home Assistant binary sensor entities.

Has anyone experienced something similar, or is anyone willing to help identify where the event processing stops? If needed, I can provide:

  • Yale Home diagnostics
  • Full debug logs
  • Exact timestamps for reproduced motion and doorbell events

Just started my smart home journey, and I’m totally new to Home Assistant. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

2

For anyone else considering integrating non-lock Yale products into Home Assistant, here is a brief update after further troubleshooting and how I fixed the issue.

SocketIO/WebSocket support was introduced in yalexs in August 2024, and the Yale Global PubNub tokens seems to have been removed shortly before the Home Assistant 2024.9.0 release.

The integration selected the push transport at brand/account level: Yale Global accounts used SocketIO/WebSocket, while other brands continued to use PubNub.

if brand is Brand.YALE_GLOBAL:
use SocketIO
else:
use PubNub

This appears to work correctly for Yale locks, but my Yale Smart Video Doorbell — despite belonging to the same YALE_GLOBAL brand — still sends activity indications through PubNub. The doorbell does not send the actual motion or button event through PubNub, but only an alive message.

I therefore created a custom version based on Home Assistant’s built-in Yale integration. It keeps SocketIO for the locks while adding a separate PubNub listener specifically for detected doorbell devices.

Each PubNub alive message triggers a short-delayed refresh of Yale’s House Activity API, which then provides the actual motion or doorbell event. Debouncing and a follow-up request were also required because the activity may not appear in the API until a few seconds after the PubNub message.

The custom integration is installed under custom_components/yale using the same yale domain, so Home Assistant loads it in place of the built-in integration, with the required yalexs version pinned.

Since these changes, motion detection, doorbell presses and automatic latest-image updates from the Yale Smart Video Doorbell have been working reliably, while my other Yale locks and smart door handles continue to work as before.