So if any of you guys remember Yolink said back in April that the Hub 3 will get an update to support local control by the end of the year. It has been 5 months since then so I figured why not message them and see if I can get an update. This is what they wrote back
“Initially, the Hub 3 was supposed to include the Local API and Matter support features. Our engineering team has made a distinction in the functions of the Hub models and as a result, the Local API function will not be enabled in Hub 3. However, please be assured that our development team is actively working on a new Hub model planned for release later this year, which will indeed support the Local API feature. For now, we don’t have yet a specific date when this hub will be available.”
So there you go, they changed their story again lol. Admittedly this doesn’t change anything as long as it comes out on time. Unless your one of the people who bought the Hub 3 early based on their previous promise. Which you really shouldn’t have done if you did.
But will this actually come out by the end of the year? If it’s legit I definitely wouldn’t bet on it. I’ve been using their products since 2021 so I’ve paid close attention to their releases. Aside from broken promises, they have a bad track record with releasing stuff on time. So maybe Spring 2025 is more likely, who knows.
I’m back here because I just found a picture of their new hub. I was scrolling through Amazon looking for a smart lever lock. Turns out they’re releasing 2 new smart locks. One being a dead bolt and the other being a lever lock. But if you check out the images in both locks, you’ll find a picture of their new hub called the X3.
I do have one question about their new locks. In the title they specifically mention that they will support Home Assistant. I’m sure they mean through the integration. Now I’m not a technical user by any means so I don’t understand how this works. Can Yolink enable it on their end or does someone from the community have to work on this to enable a new device?
If they claim it will work with Home Assistant then that means through their integration. They have a developer actively maintaining that integration and why it’s “official”. That, unfortunately, does not mean it will work immediately or fully. I’d check the GitHub integration ReadMe for details. Or the HA integration webpage for YoLink. It often lists what is compatible when not everything is.
I checked both, no mention of new locks in the Yolink integration page on Home Assistant. But when I went to the GitHub and clicked on releases, they mention adding 3 locks back on July 18th.
The model numbers doesn’t match their current 3 locks. So I guess they’re good to go and the integration page at Home Assistant just hasn’t been updated yet?
Hopefully. If they don’t actually work, I’d say that would be grounds for being able to return the product without any pushback. They claim it works with Home Assistant it appears.
Unfortunately that won’t be possible. Been down that road before.
While you can buy your own LoRa hub, you won’t be able to connect to their devices or even find them. To successfully link with a LoRa device, you will need to have it’s security keys and device code (I don’t have the exact terms right off hand). While you can get the device ID from their app, the keys are locked up and YoLink won’t let them go. This key is required because the communication between LoRa devices is encrypted (typically) and it is used in the handshaking process to bless the device and link it to your gateway.
The other challenge will be determining how their device even reports data. So say you do manage to crack the encryption key and get it joined to your hub, YoLink is not going to give up the beans on how they send their payload. They use custom ICs in their sensors that is a combined ARM proc and LoRa radio so there is tight integration. There have been some attempts to dump the firmware of these chips but little success (in fact, none last I checked) has been made in reading said dumps. The ICs in the sensors are also write-locked so you cannot reflash them. Part of the job of the ARM proc in each sensor is to not only read sensor data and package it into a payload, it also encrypts on top of the existing encrypted LoRa communication. Fun.
Attempts have been made to find cracks in the original Hub but since it is just an ESP8266 and acts basically as an MQTT relay (as others have posted), there isn’t much benefit to it. When booting up the hub, it does attempt to connect to an AP but nothing was gained trying to sniff out what its purpose is other than a debug page or two. Ultimately it just forwards the encrypted payload from the sensor up to the cloud (via MQTT) and they process it on their end. This is all pretty much spelled out in their website when they talk about end-to-end encryption.
It’s really sad that they’ve made their sensors basically land waste if they ever went out of business. The sensors are built very well, have excellent battery life and, at least from my experience, were very reliable. Offering local control would put a major dent into their business model once you know the details and look at the whole picture.
Plus, the next time they update their firmware - wouldn’t they be able to simply lock you out again?
The only reason why I stick with Yolink is because of the Virtualarm service for 24/7 monitoring I use primarily for leak and smoke/CO2 detection - I am contacted and then if I do not respond the authorities are called.
When I brought this up with a very high level contact I know at Shelly (cannot disclose who) - from whom I have learned they are looking into a way of implementing something similar for their devices, possibly outside of HA. This person however also thinks very highly of HA, I also mentioned if it could be inclued in their HA integration that would be even better!
The integration is pretty easy, you’re just publishing data via MQTT or receiving data via MQTT in a subscribe / publish topic.
Its just a matter of parsing the data, and having the correct endpoints and data structure.
You complain about the yolink security, but as someone who has over a thousand sensors in the wild, im glad its there. Nobody can tamper with my stuff.
While the encryption could be broken, or the keys could possibly be extracted from the device itself, probably only a very talented security researcher will be able to do it, which makes it impractical. Just use MQTT and write your own code if you need to interact with the sensors, it all works really well.
The point is, the MQTT communication in HA for Yolink is only between your local HA and the Yolink servers in the cloud over the internet, which then communicate with the your local Yolink Hub over the internet cloud, and then and only then that local yolink hub talks to the yolink sensors. There is no communication at all between your local Yolink Hub and your local HA in either direction. There is no way to communicate directly from your local HA to your local Yolink Hub, or from your local HA to your local Yolink Sensors either. So I don’t understand how you are saying you can have MQTT connectivity between your local Yolink Sensors and your local HA instance, that is not the way it works…