For those of us who are unable to retrofit their deadbolt with a smart lock, the Sesame, created by CANDY HOUSE, is a great option. The engineers are a great group of people who are very quick to fix the (very few) bugs I’ve reported while letting me beta test their WiFi module.

The only thing I wish it had was HomeKit support – which they say have planned – and is still understandably further down the road given all the work they’ve been doing on their second version of the API.

Thankfully we have already been able to integrate HomeKit and Sesame with the homebridge-qsesame plugin. And while it works well for the most part, there were some improvements I felt could be made with a new plugin.

homebridge-sesame

homebridge-sesame was recently published to npm and the repository is available at GitHub.

And a huge thank you to CANDY HOUSE for including the plugin in their list of third-party libraries as well as linking to it in a blog post.

Advantages

So why use the new plugin? The main advantage is that it utilizes homebridge platforms rather than a single accessory. The latter can be very limiting, because (in this case) if you have multiple Sesame locks, you would only be able to configure and control one of them in HomeKit. Whereas platforms allow automatic discovery and configuration of multiple devices. Even if you don’t have multiple locks, you still get the benefit of easier configuration.

Other (minor) advantages include being more up-to-date than homebridge-qsesame (last updated 2017), better error handling, and better logging.

Installation

These instructions assume you have a running homebridge server.

Install with this simple command:

npm install -g homebridge-sesame

Configuration

Create a new Sesame platform entry in your homebridge config file. Here’s an example file:

{
  "bridge": {
    "name": "Homebridge",
    "username": "CD:22:3D:E3:CE:30",
    "port": 51826,
    "pin": "031-45-156"
  },
  "platforms": [
    {
      "platform": "Sesame",
      "email": "[email protected]",
      "password": "password123"
    }
  ]
}

All you have to specify are your email and password and you’re good to go. When you restart your homebridge server, your locks will show up in your preferred HomeKit app.