Homebridge Bold BLE

Homebridge Bold BLE is a Homebridge plugin to provide HomeKit support for Bold Smart Cylinder locks. This plugin is similar to the great homebridge-bold plugin, but instead controls your smart locks through a direct Bluetooth (BLE) connection.

Some key features / differences:

• Instead of using remote activation through Bold's API server, Homebridge Bold BLE connects directly to your smart lock to control it.
• This means that for this plugin no Bold Connect hub is required! You can even use HomeKit to perform remote activation for your locks, provided you have a device acting as a home hub (e.g. Apple TV or HomePod).
• Your Homebridge device (e.g. Raspberry Pi running Homebridge) needs to be within Bluetooth range of the Bold locks you wish to control.
• No internet connection is required at the moment of unlocking. This also makes the unlock a bit quicker, since it avoids a roundtrip to the Bold API when unlocking.
• This plugin is not completely offline, though: it still has to pull fresh keys from the Bold API every 3-4 days. This is done automatically in the background to make sure an unlock request through HomeKit can always be handled quickly and offline.
• Bold locks in your account / that you have access to are automatically added. However, only Bold locks that are actually within Bluetooth range are exposed to HomeKit.

Installation

To install Homebridge Bold BLE:

• Follow the instructions on the Homebridge Wiki to install Node.js and Homebridge.
• Depending on your OS, you might need to install a few Bluetooth-related packages; however, for the official Homebridge Raspberry Pi image, the plugin works out of the box without any additional packages.
• Install the Homebridge Bold BLE plugin through Homebridge Config UI X or manually by:

  sudo npm install --global homebridge-bold-ble

• Run through the login flow within Homebridge Config UI X (recommended!) or see Configuration for other options.

Configuration

It is recommended to use Homebridge Config UI X to configure the plugin. A login flow is provided to obtain the required access tokens.

Alternatively, you can manually configure the plugin with tokens you've obtained in a different way.

The configuration is identical to the homebridge-bold plugin, so please see its configuration documentation for more info. Just make sure to use "BoldBLE" instead of "Bold" for the platform property.

There are 3 ways to authenticate:

• Default authentication using @StefanNienhuis's hosted authentication server.
• Default authentication with your own hosted authentication server; requires your own OAuth client ID and secret from Bold.
• Legacy authentication; not recommended: it will sign you out of your Bold app, because it supports only 1 active session.

For simplicity, the login flow provided with this plugin only performs the first, recommended way. For the alternative ways, you could: install homebridge-bold, go through the desired authentication flow, and finally copy the resulting tokens into your Homebridge Bold BLE configuration.

Authors

• Robbert Klarenbeek, robbertkl@renbeek.nl

Credits

Thanks to @StefanNienhuis for creating the original homebridge-bold plugin and hosting the authentication server that this plugin uses.

If you're considering buying a Bold Smart Lock, get a 10% discount and support @StefanNienhuis by using the referral code: STENIE1.

License

Homebridge Bold BLE is published under the MIT License.