I started a new project I thought would be fun and it’s turned into a complete waste of time and money.  😞

One of the light switches in my office is Bluetooth only because that’s all that was available.  It was also only barely supported in Home Assistant with most mentions of it being a few years old.  I figured I was up to the task of making it work though and went down the rabbit hole of ordering and building a Bluetooth proxy that would talk to it and relay messages back to Home Assistant where I could then automate tasks for it.

I spent way too much money getting that set up, ordering parts from Europe to get stuff that was in stock and known to be reliable.

So… with parts now in hand… I went to build it and found out two things.  Firstly, the old integration that maybe sort of might have made this work was removed from Home Assistant IN DECEMBER.  Secondly, the reason it didn’t work anymore is because Leviton made changes to the firmware that broke every known way of communicating with the switch outside of their stupid official app.

I tried modifying some old Python code to try to crack it and had no luck at all.  So basically, the proxy is useless to me now. 

Lastly, as one last kick in the teeth, sometime late last year Leviton released a new version of the switch using their latest tech so they’re now using Wi-Fi and are Matter compatible…  and buying one would have been cheaper than what I spent on the Bluetooth proxy.  

So…  that all sucks. 😞

Now I’m desperately looking for some other use case for the Bluetooth proxy and not having any luck with that either.

So yeah…  my Home Assistant server now has Bluetooth support for no reason whatsoever and I still can’t automate my office lights to easily activate Meeting Mode.