Today I want to talk to you again about Smart locks but not of its use itself or of which lock is compatible with Matter, much less, but of their use and safety when you have children at home, following a little on the line of the entrance a couple of weeks ago where I was talking about the Tedee lock..
Security of smart locks
In all these years, I’ve been teasing with different domestic cacarros, I’ve only heard one case where the lock has opened «alone» (see «alone» in quotes) and left the door open. This happened to Alex Barredo, mixx.io and Kernel podcaster and a very technological guy, but the thing is that He swears and perjures that his door opened alone with a Nuki lock and sent it to the manufacturer and everything to investigate what had happened. I’ve never heard it again, so I point out that it would be a bad configuration or a rare automation that opened the door…
In any case, when we change the lock, We always worry about whether the smart locks are safe, if they can be hacked by a malot, if they use encryption, of course if they’re Thread, Matter, HomeKit or whatever… and then the real problem doesn’t usually come around, but it happens when someone at home plays where they shouldn’t unintentionally, which is what happened to me.
As I told you the other day, one of my children (Miguel, my favorite, which is not why it has ceased to be), opened the lock from the Apple House app being all out of the house… And the door was left open for a few hours.. I wasn’t even there, but when I opened the latch, it opened a little bit that was only seen if you looked at it, but only by pushing it could anyone have come in. As I told you the other day, you can imagine my wife’s chicken, another automation of those that almost cost me a divorce. If I remember I still cry.
So, after telling you the other day how the Tedee Go has rejuvenated thanks to the compatibility with Matter, today I want to talk about something quite more important than the version of the standard or that it is now more beautiful in the House app: access management. It is very good to have the lock integrated into our ecosystem, but it is even more important to have control over who can open, from where it can open and under what conditions it can do so.
The problem: the permits in the Home app
The problem with having the lock integrated into the Home app, is that by default, anyone with access to the Home app will be able to open the door. No, don’t worry about Siri. That’s what a lot of people think that HomePods has at home and a smart lock that someone can say from the other side of the door screaming «OYE LOLA, OPEN THE PUERT» and Siri is gonna open it, it’s a lie. For Apple, a lock is a security device and several conditions have to be given to unlock the lock.
Apple HomeKit has not improved too much in recent times some more family of supported devices, finer control of the cameras, compatibility with Matter… but your permit model and privilege management remains your pending subject. As I have all my children in the House app, I can’t tell you «that my son Paul can only touch his devices and these common ones, but that he can’t touch his brother’s balls by turning him on and off the light,» this can’t be done. The Apple House app only distinguishes between Residents and Guests. The Residents have full access to everything always, but the
s Guest have access only to Cerras and other security related accessories and within a defined schedule. This Guest profile is designed for cleaning staff or specific work that needs to enter during the day or during the night and little more, you can close the entry hours… but it’s not good for my children. And in Residents, because what I was saying, you can’t tell him «the lights are, but the lock is not.» What we can do in the Home app is to enter the settings of those users and change the parameter ‘Control the accessories remotely’ to NO, so from outside you will not be able to access anything.
This. It should not be a problem as we have a thousand automations with conditions. My children don’t have to turn off the light from far away because when they get away from home, it goes out alone and the radiator in their room is fitted because there’s no one… and when they’re coming home because just the other way around, if it’s night, the light in their room is turned on before they get there and the radiator gets to warm it up if the room is less temperature than it likes, But we have the bitch on the portal phone, they won’t be able to activate to open the portal because they’re out of home.
I could put it in. The Ring Intercom app that is less critical than the house lock After all, I don’t care if they open the portal unintentionally… and also could use the secret code, that I already told you that if you touch the portal more than a number of times in less than a number of seconds… in fact, when I told you that I said the number of times you had to touch and I had to change it, of course.
Finally, that Apple doesn’t give that level of granularity in each accessory’s permissions and that’s bullshit., what you’re going to do… the truth is it doesn’t make any sense if I let you open the portal from outside, you can turn on and off lights and of course open and close the door of the entrance.
What about Home Assistant?
With Home Assistant things change, although there are some things to consider. Home Assistant automation works with triggers, conditions and actions, and can also use person or device _ tracker entities, areas, states, schedules and all kinds of conditioners to control when something can happen and when not.
So from Home Assistant you can make a custom button or script that only works if your child’s device is at home or in the home area you can define, so if you try to run it when you’re not home just not at all. Or just get the open button when you’re home and the rest of the time is hidden. You can also add hours so that they don’t open it at an unchanging hour, the presence of the rest of the family so they can’t open the door if there is no adult at home (from automation, of course, they can always get close to the door and let the bride in).
The only thing you have to keep in mind is that you can’t expose the direct entity of the lock but the automation, as the lock entity that is what the lock is called, with its little button to open and close, does not allow a condition to be inserted.… so you have to create a script or self-quote that reviews certain conditions before making the unlock… but of course, from Home Assistant this is very simple to do. In addition, you can make that if the condition is fulfilled, the lock opens, but if it is not, a notification will come to you saying, «Your son Paul has not only suspended mathematics but is also trying to open the door.
from home from high school. »
I recently discovered at Home Assistant about the conditional cards, which is what I told you to show or hide devices according to conditions. The truth is that Home Assistant is very cool, it’s a pity that you have no high availability yet and that you have no choice but to delegate all the management of your home-style to a single cache… which should not be ruined, it is true, but for example Antonio, a close-to-home neighbor who bought a Home-style Assistant Green after we made a home-based consulting… because a few days ago he was screwed by the physical cache of Home Assistant Green! I’ve never seen a fault like this before. It doesn’t start.
a giving a load failure with its segmentation fault included and when trying to reinstall it also gave error during the installation process, it seems to be a physical problem of the RAM as it could be started even from the memory card, and that in Live mode does not use local storage… but of course, the RAM does. Total, that it was your call to the manufacturer and you are going to send another one… but not to get stuck as you use it to manage a lot of irrigation and temperature sensors, we install Home Assistant on an iMac you have in the office. Yeah, that versatility’s cool, it’s true, but imagine the scare and the bad time you spend until you put it in a V.
irtualBox on your desktop computer, you restore backup and you see that you kind of have it all working out… that couple of hours make you eternal.
Well what I was going to, that These conditional cards allow you to show or hide things according to conditions. My kids don’t need to see the lock when they’re out of the house. And many less the cameras See if I’m with my wife. crawling at home taking advantage of that privacy time and some of them connect to the cameras… I do, though, they still touch the door one of them because it’s run out of batteries or God knows and I want to open it from the office, I don’t know… but for example the garage door doesn’t need to open it unless I’m getting close to the car, so I can show it and hide it. I don’t know, you can do interesting things, you see.
Please note that This also has to do with the permissions you give your children at Home Assistant, of course.. If you can enter the settings directly and from there look directly for the lock device, the lock, even if you don’t show it on the panel… because you’re fucked, of course. That already depends on what you want to run the permissions… well, keep in mind that wherever the permissions don’t come in, you always have the possibility to use the father-in-law, that big forgotten.
Shut up, talking about the father couple, once years ago one of my children who had done nothing took a slap… and at the same time said he was a battered child. Anyway. The thing is, I said, «Look… one day when I was little, I was in the house of my yayos, touching my brother’s balls… my mother was all over the place… suddenly my brother started crying and I ran out like I had nothing to do with it… and my father who saw me run through the garden while my mother was screaming at me and my brother was crying, threw a tool at me, a plain that stuck in my leg. I was literally nailed. And I left there limping… And neither is fu
And abuse! I deserved it! «Macho if today some things that didn’t work out wrong have been lost. Anyway.
Back to the subject, you can get me!
What if I don’t have Home Assistant?
What about people who don’t have Home Assistant and don’t want to open this melon? As my friend Txarly I have told you many times, also neighbor of Colmenar. Well, we have a chance to use Tedee’s app… and what do you want me to say, I I’m anti-apps, I’d rather have it all in a beautiful and unified ecosystem, either in Home Assistant or HomeKit, so I can make conditioned automations and so on… but Tedee’s app is the bomb! And you don’t know what’s fucking me!
The Tedee app
The point is that Tedee’s app allows you to do a lot of things very «lock,» to put it in some way. Remember that we can’t completely uninstall it because the option to calibrate the lock is not in Home Assistant or HomeKit, it can only be done from the app… so well, having it will have the same, but it also allows to create users with different levels of access. You can of course make the cleaning staff or the painter who’s going to be in your house for a few days or the gardener can only enter at certain hours, of course you can deactivate the remote unlock… but also has a super interesting thing and you can tell him that a user
or concrete cannot unlock the lock if it is not conected to it by BLUETOTH! I fucking think this is the bomb, actually, it’s the perfect solution! Not only for my children, but also for the cases I told you about before cleaning people, maintenance, your parents who are spending a few days at home because they live away… not to mention whether you have that lock in a house you rent for AirBNB or any other app. In addition, you can limit access by dates, days, see the activity and know exactly who has opened, which from the Home app you can’t… have access automatically revoked on a date, you manually revoke it if that person and
a must not be able to access or if your son has lost his cell phone or any other move… the truth is I would love that all of this could be managed from the home app, but I’m afraid we are YEARS of that granularity, while the people of Tedee have been doing only locks for many years and know perfectly well what the users need.
And with any advanced shortcuts?
Some of you have ever asked me about Telegram’s group or some Domotic Consulting. This cannot be done with a shortcut in HomeKit so that the lock only works if the person is at home or connected to the wifi because it is in front of the door And his cell phone’s already been connected. And yes, can be done with a shortcut in an automation, but that does not really intercept a user’s manual touch on the lock in the Home app. You can automate things after that unlock… I know, you get the lights on when the door opens, send a notification and you could even try to close the lock.
You can’t tell HomeKit, «if this son of mine who is a resident touches the lock from outside, blocks the action and doesn’t execute it.» This authorisation model does not exist as such in Apple Home at least for now.
And with Controller for HomeKit?
With Controller for Homekit, you know that for me is one of those apps that should be reinstalled on any iPhone, you can thinner and adjust more things from automation, you know that now allows advanced and logical conditions, conditions of type IF / ELSE and with the Plus version that have made additional payment you can even run automatic workflows that give us more cool things. You can do for example that if the lock opens and there is no one in the home area (you can also adjust with the action radius you want) or should not have opened at that time, you receive immediate notification of those reviews that sound like
The cell phone is silent. You can also set up a workflow so that if the lock unlocks and certain conditions are not met, a small delay will be reblocked. You can put in context, logical combinations, schedules, presence and states of other accessories… but what you can’t do is change Apple’s security model and say my son Paul has no permission for this particular lock but for the rest of the house. I mean, all reactive measures… but the lock has opened.
So, If you ask me what the best option is… because I’ll tell you that, if you don’t have the domesticated portal, you directly give them access to the Apple House app but without the possibility of using the accessories in Remoto. You don’t stop them from touching each other’s noses by turning on and off the lights… or any other male shit, because my eldest son came up with his girlfriend once, and the bastards of his brothers put the light of the red room and romantic songs on his HomePod… but you’ll get them to not open the door unintentionally from your second residence.
If you have the portal domesticated with a Ring or similar, then you cannot disable this option (well, you can always put the 2 apps on them, the Ring and Tedee’s with their access management… but we’re already segregating a lot and complicating their life, they have to open several apps to get in and light a light.) In that case, the best is the Tedee app to open the door only by Bluetooth and the rest of the things in HomeKit’s House app… but remember not to post the lock on the House app, eh? You’ll all have to use the Tedee app to enter.
And If you have Home Assistant, then fight with your children’s users’ permissions and smart cards so that they can only open the lock by a script or automation when they are close to home, but they cannot reach it directly from the Settings or by calling the lock device.
You see, the app House is very cute, very clean, very Apple to put it in some way… but it’s too short on a lot of things. It’s a shame because I like to have one app for everything, but what’s going to be done… And no, I’m not going to use Home Assistant as a base again, fuck the Nuc as it has happened to Antonio with the Home Assistant Green and it costs me the safe divorce… I think I’ve already had too much of the rope, I don’t want to even imagine what if something this fat happens that leaves me without domotics… or if you keep the door open when there’s no one at home.