BleBox device - sharing recent experience

Hello fellow Hubitat users. I thought I'd make a post with my most recent experience with BleBox devices, in case others consider buying them (or are already buying them).

Exec summary:
Don't buy with Hubitat.

What is BleBox?
It is a small Polish company crating IoT control devices over WiFi, including in-wall relays, sensors, shutter controllers, and more. Their homepage is "nice and professional".

Hubitat integration:
Good community driver and App made by @djgutheinz and you can find the first release-thread for his work here. Thanks so much for your effort over the years Dave. :slight_smile:

Real world experience:
The build quality of their products is solid. Unfortunately the same can not be said of their approach to software. Over the years they have made numerous changes, breaking their API's, removing local administration over http, and requiring the use of their "companion app" for iOS and Android.

I initially purchased BleBox devices because they were simple to use, with a kind of "no-BS" approach to design. But the company has developed delusions of grandeur and is pushing users into their own "ecosystem", where they also want you to "register" devices - essentially making them yet another annoying cloud-tie-in you didn't want (because that's why you got a Hubitat in the first place). Their altered approach makes mixed environments a PITA to work with. No less than four times have I encountered issues after upgrading the software/firmware of the devices, because of breaking changes to local APIs, authentication or device enrollment.

Reaching out to their support by e-mail resulted in polite but ultimately unhelpful responses, where they defended their API-breaking changes and loss of local admin access as the price of doing business with them.

Dave has done his best to keep the Hubitat community driver updated, which is awesome. Thanks again. But at the end of the day, the WAF gets extremely low when I have to explain to my wife that the bathroom fan or towel heater doesn't work because one firmware hates the other, and some community driver isn't working with the latest insanity from BleBox. She's a DevOps wiz, but absolutely not a fan of "overcomplicated home automation". I probably shouldn't have asked for her help debugging Groovy drivers in an IoT ecosystem that doesn't interest her ... I lost another WAF point right there. I'll be hearing about the insanity of having to write Groovy code for a bathroom fan for at least a couple of weeks now.

If you already have BleBox devices, and they are working, don't touch them. Don't upgrade them, and don't mess with them.

If you are considering new in-wall devices for your Hubitat installation, my advice is to stay clear of BleBox. It's too much of a hassle. While they theoretically may have made their last breaking change now, their indifference to API stability should tell you something. And that's on top of their emerging mandatory "cloud ecosystem".

YMMV off course. The hardware build quality seems solid. As for me, I am dumping them and going with something simpler. Perhaps a SONOFF dual relay. I value my time too much to accept IoT devices that steal my time every year and a half with some insane breaking change.

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I will be checking (this month?) what has changed. Initial look shows several devices have updated to new API. I will have to determine how to use different API versions (if there are changes due to the control provided in my drivers from the API changes).

Limitation: I do not have a full set of devices and my test-bed is in long-term storage. It may take awhile to dig everything out.

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