Door lock requires PIN over matter

[latent sparrow]

TLDR, I wanted to look into HAs matter over thread capabilities and see if there was any support for sending and managing PINs as part of my necessary management of a smart lock.

So, I recently installed a Yale Matter lock and the device has some quirks that are presenting a challenge for my current hub and I wanted to check if anyone could provide guidance on whether HA might fair better.

The lock is an either / or situation where I can use Yale's Bluetooth app or I can connect to a matter hub over thread. You have to factory reset to swap between. The door has a keypad and I can configure multiple PINs and limit access per PIN.

If the device is on matter, my hub needs to be able to program these PINs or the keypad is useless. Beyond that, the lock seems to expect one of these PINs to be sent as part of the unlock command. My current hub does not support either of these functionalities. Google Home, however does and I've been able to get the lock fully functional over matter via Google home. Beyond my current reliance in Google home, I like the lock and would like to keep it.

So again, the question is does HA have support for setting and sending PINs? Is there perhaps a Yale integration that works with this particular lock?

For background, I just started developing my smart home and this is one of my first devices. I was convinced to try Homey over HA, but it has already presented short comings for my intended environment, so I'm checking if HA will better serve me before jumping ship.

[dense fox]

What a pity, and also bad implementation from Yale... (and also afaik, PIN management isn't part of the matter specification (yet))

So, I don't know your exact use case, and this is probably not what you were looking for, BUT:
You could create (a) specific user(s) in HA, and using HA's hidden authorization feature you could expose only the lock(s) and possibly a few additional items. "The PIN" would be the user's password, of course.

These are the two documents to get you started:

• https://developers.home-assistant.io/blog/2019/03/11/user-permissions/
• https://developers.home-assistant.io/docs/auth_permissions/

[latent sparrow]

I guess one big question is whether HA's current implementation of matter is able to send a PIN as part of the unlock request. I've seen a few feature requests asking for support and see there's some zigbee apps that do what I need, but haven't found a matter one just yet.

The reason I'm asking if HA itself supports the required attributes over matter is that support for my current Homey smart hub says it's not possible at all on their platform (even if an app were developed to do so) due to their hubs limited matter capabilities, so unless they decide to update their base matter implementation this lock will never work directly on their platform.

[untold canopy]

I think there were discussions about adding support for vendor specified PIN settings via Matter. But it is not a thing yet.

Aliro could solve this hopefully

[latent sparrow]

Yeah, I've seen a few discussions about adding different support and I'm assuming it's in the pipe.

With my Honey hub I was told that there's no way to support it even coding your own app because the device itself doesn't support sending any attribute types other than their limited list.

I haven't been able to find anything on whether that limitation is present in HA or not. If I could even just hard code it to send a static PIN with each push, that would at least get the lock operational for now while I wait on future integrations.

[plain dagger]

Managing lock PINs is not supported in HA:

• The frontend is not suitable. A panel is needed to manage it.
• The Matter backend does not currently support this command due to limitations.

You can do this using the Apple Home app

[latent sparrow]

That answers the big question. If the backend doesn't support the PIN commands over matter, I'm kinda forced into using a different hub...

[plain dagger]

Another Matter controller

[latent sparrow]

I'm hoping that HA has a way to tell Google Home to push the command maybe?

Then I could at least still centralize my daily use of the lock

[plain dagger]

I only know that it is compatible with Apple Home. I don't have anything to test it with for the others.

This is not indicated in the documentation.
https://developers.home.google.com/matter/supported-devices

[latent sparrow]

Oh, the door lock itself is fully supported in Google Home. That I've tested and the thing's even branded for Google Home

I'm just hoping HA has an easy way to basically use Google as it's proxy to lock/unlock the door

Make like a dummy device w/ a toggle, and then have the event from the trigger "Tell google to lock/unlock the front door"

[plain dagger]

This is not possible because that is not how Matter works.
Matter controllers contact devices directly. That is precisely the principle of multi-vendor.

[latent sparrow]

I did a bit of research and it looks like the functionality that I want is possible with Google Home. Instead of a Matter command, it would be a call to Google Home using the HA Google Assistant SDK.
Looks like I could create a dummy entity in HA using a template, and have the action use the Google Assistant Send Text service and literally send "Unlock the front door" to Google Home.
I'm able to join the lock to Homey and pull status, so I imagine HA should be able to do the same, so maybe I can either somehow have HA send those actions instead of the standard Lock/Unlock actions from that device, or maybe I can at least have the Template check the device status to see if it should lock/unlock the door.
I'm sure this is going to add some delay compared to directly triggering the device with matter.

https://everythingsmarthome.co.uk/controlling-google-home-with-home-assistant/

Apparently some things have changed since this guy made this guide, but ideally it'll get me started