Tesa Assa Abloy ENTR remote control w/ Home Assistant + MQTT

I recently bought a smart lock for my apartment by Tesa: Assa Abloy ENTR. It is a smart lock which replaces the cylinder lock of your door and provides smart functionalities and different access methods: wireless keypads, biometric reader and even smartphone app access through Bluetooth.

However, there’s one big functionality missing: remote control over the Internet. The use case is simple: imagine you want to open the door to someone when you are not at home. The only possibility would be creating a new code for this person, asking him to download the ENTR app, configure the smart lock with his code and access. Pretty lame.

This is a tricky workaround to automate and integrate your Tesa smart lock with Home Assistant and have full remote control over it. You will need:

1. Home Assistant Server
2. An old Android smartphone

Configure Home Assistant

1. Once you have an instance of Home Assitant up and running, make sure you set a Static IP so you always know where to find it in your network: Supervisor > System > Host

2. Install Mosquito Broker: an MQTT server. Supervisor > Add-on Store > Mosquito Broker > Install. Now you should have a fully functional MQTT server in your Home Assistant IP on port 1883.

Install Automate on Android

1. From your smartphone, create a new User in the Tesa ENTR App: you will use it in your old Android phone. When you create the user, you will get a key you can use to activate the access in the other phone.
2. Get your old Android phone and install the Tesa ENTR App: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.multlock.ekeys&hl=es&gl=US
3. Set up the lock access using the key you created in step 1
4. Check you can open manually the door using the app in the old Android phone.
5. Now download ‘MQTT Client’ in the Android phone: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=in.dc297.mqttclpro&hl=es&gl=US

2. Add a new broker and fill in the MQTT info for your Home Assistant server:

Host: the static IP of your Home Assistant server

Username: your Home Assistant username

Password: your Home Assistant password

3. Subcribe to a new topic named ‘main’

4. Download ‘Automate’ by Llamalabs: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.llamalab.automate&hl=es&gl=US

5. Download this flow for Automate, which will automatically open the ENTR app and swipe to open the door when a new MQTT messages comes in: https://llamalab.com/automate/community/flows/39423

6. Make sure you configure appropriately the block refered to the MQTT connection in Automate, it may difer.

7. Start the automation

8. In your computer, go to Home Assistant web page and add a new Button widget to Lovelace so that it calls the MQTT Publish service as follows:

9. Finally, save the widget, tap the button and see the magic happening!