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12f1f11 · Jan 8, 2018

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warnings.md

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A few words of caution

This plugin is a hacked solution for a range extender. It works for me. If it works for you great. If not, I'm sorry. I'll try to help as much as I can, but expect it to fail.

In addition there's a couple of things I urge you not to do via this plugin and to understand them properly before you continue.

Firmware upgrades

Do not upgrade the firmware of your accessory via this plugin. Upgrading the firmware requires the exchange of large amounts of binary data. There's likely aspects of the protocols that haven't been understood or implemented wrong. Running a firmware update through this plugin may brick you accessory.

If you really need to upgrade the firmware of the device:

You'll have to setup all your rules and scenes again.

HomeKit Limitations

There's likely technical reasons why there's no commercially available range extender as of this writing. Expect to hit those technical restrictions for some devices.

Device restrictions

Some devices may only support a limited total number of pairings over their life span. Do not pair/unpair excessively or you may run into this.

Number of Bluetooth accessories

The current implementation does not work well with many paired bluetooth accessories - a recommendation is to keep the total number lower than 5. However there's no hard limit to this number - it may work well if you pair more devices. If you start seeing issues, try reducing the number of paired accessories. The limit is really in the Bluetooth stack of the system running Homebridge and thus the limitations described on the noble page apply.

Using this plugin with other homebridge plugins

I have not tested this plugin in parallel with other homebridge plugins. It'll likely work, but take note that there are some timing considerations in the HAP BLE protocol, which may render the connection to the Bluetooth accessory unstable.

Also the plugin will postpone the start of homebridge until it's connected to all configured Bluetooth HomeKit Accessories. This may delay the start for other plugins too.

I'd strongly encourage you to run this on a dedicated Raspberry Pi Zero W and not share the Homebridge instance with other plugins. You could always run multiple homebridge instances on the same system and they'll not affect each other.

Retain the the attribute database

This plugin writes an attribute database, periodically, which contains data about the provided services and the pairing keys to your accessory. If those get lost for one reason or the other you'll have to manually reset the accessory to factory settings to pair it again.

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