After writing my last post about my frustrations in trying to get this to work, it occurred to me that I didn’t really provide much detail that will save others from going through the same ordeal.

My journey started with a Decora Digital DD710-BDZ 0-10V Dimmer Switch but it’s my impression that this will apply to all of the old Decora Digital Bluetooth devices.

This does NOT apply to Decora Smart devices using Wi-Fi, which integrate nicely with Home Assistant. And if you’re out of the loop like I was, you’ll be happy to know that there is now a new version of the 0-10V dimmer that will work. If you need one of these, buy the D2710-1BW instead.

Now, when I tried to get this working, I found several old links implying that it at least used to work and thought that maybe I just had to put a bit of effort in. You’ll come across mentions of an old Home Assistant integration that’s no longer maintained and if you try to find the details you’ll discover it’s been removed entirely. That only happened a month ago though, so in my defense I started researching this a long time ago and it wasn’t removed yet.

You might still find these old docs though and think, like I did, that surely you can make it work! You’ll then come across this old GitHub repo with instructions on how to get the API key that’s the magic sauce that makes everything work but of course, it won’t work.

You won’t be discouraged by the fact it’s all decade-old code because you’ll find THIS project that’s only 7 years old that KNOWS the other one doesn’t work but apparently resolved the issues.

Of course, that one doesn’t work anymore either but since THEY were able to fix it, surely YOU can fix it too!

Now… stop. JUST STOP.

Whatever Leviton did to break it made it properly broke and nothing I tried could get through to it. And I TRIED. I could read status values and I attempted to write to it but I couldn’t find anything resembling a key in it and I couldn’t get it to respond at all to any of my commands.

My best guess is that whatever Leviton did to it, they did it as a security fix and closed the hole that was allowing any sort of control of it outside their official app. You simply can’t fool it into giving up the key anymore and you can’t make it do anything without it.

At least now there’s an alternative to it that supports Matter and will do everything you want it to. There wasn’t when I bought mine. So just bite the bullet and buy that one. Don’t waste as much time as I did and don’t think that this got abandoned way back in the day just out of laziness.

And as a footnote, if anyone at Leviton would like to reach out and help with a solution to make this viable again, I’m all ears and will be happy to take it back on with some official support.

 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.