Zigbee Door Lock Pin Codes

Mozilla IoT
#1

I am considering a Zigbee based pin-code operated deadbolt (Schlage) for a rental property. I see the Zigbee Adapter already supports lock/unlock. I’ve examined the Zigbee Cluster documentation and see the protocol has messages defined for setting PIN entry codes. Does the adapter support this functionality?

#2

Unfortunately, it doesn’t currently support entering/managing the PIN/user codes.

#3

I’ve got a lot of irons in the fire, but I’d be willing to spend some time working on adding it. Are there any design considerations I would need to consider?

#4

The biggest issue is the UI. I just ran into this issue with the zwave adapter as well. The Yale zwave lock I was using supports 100 user codes.

One possibility would be initially support some small number of PIN/User codes and create a property per code.

I think that the right long term solution is to have some custom UI, and have a single user-code property which would bring up the custom UI when clicking on that property (or something along those lines).

#5

We discussed this in a meeting yesterday and there are a couple of approaches that were raised:

  1. Representing the list of codes as an object property (A map of strings in JSON)
  2. Having the adapter add-on provide custom UI for managing codes

Number 1 requires new features in the gateway to represent properties with a type of object in the UI, which is already support in the Web Thing API specification.

Number 2 is technically possible today by having an adapter expose a URL for a custom web UI in a Thing Description.

"links": [
  {
    "rel": "alternate",
    "mediaType": "text/html",
    "href": "/things/lock"
  }
]

Unfortunately in practice this is quite hard to do in an add-on and I’m not sure whether anyone has figured out how to do it yet.

We’re going to try to add a smart lock capability in the next release, so will look at this in more detail. Ideas and contributions welcome.

#6

Ok, looks like I have some reading to do in order to catch up with the concepts here. Is either option preferred by the team over the other?

On a side note, my Schlage Connect Smart Deadbolt (Zigbee) arrived last night. After a few failed attempts, I was able to pair and activate the lock.