Ctrlable BE3

Home Assistant integration for LifeSmart SUBLIME control panels, reached over their BE3 CoTP network adaptor.

Panels are discovered from the gateway itself: every component on the bus becomes a device, and each device carries its own settings page and an identify button so an installer can tell which panel is which.

Early release. The protocol layer is verified against real hardware; the Home Assistant layer has had limited field testing. Please report what breaks.

Install

HACS → ⋮ → Custom repositories → add Ctrlable/ctrlable-be3, category Integration → install → restart Home Assistant.

Then Settings → Devices & services → Add integration → Ctrlable BE3. Gateways on the network are found automatically.

What you get

Every component the gateway reports becomes a device, whether or not anyone has said what it is yet. Each device has:

• an Identify button, which makes the panel flash — the only way to tell which physical panel an address belongs to
• a Configure page for its type, button count, name and panel grouping

Components configured as keypads also get:

• an event entity per button, firing press, click, hold and hold_release
• a backlight switch per button (disabled by default, assumed state — the gateway accepts LED commands but never reports LED state)

Button actions are also published on the event bus as ctrlable_be3_keypad_event, carrying keypad_id, address, button and action.

Services

Service	What it does
identify	Flash a component so it can be located
set_address	Move a component to a different bus address
configure_keypad	Provision a component as a keypad
clear_configuration	Clear a component's stored configuration
start_update	Start a pending gateway firmware update

How it works

The roles are reversed from most integrations: Home Assistant is the TCP server. While no gateway is connected it broadcasts a search datagram on UDP 12345, and the gateway connects back to port 21324.

A gateway accepts one controller at a time, and ignores discovery while it believes it has one. Moving a gateway from another controller therefore needs that controller removed and the gateway power-cycled — it has no keepalive of its own, so it will otherwise hold a dead connection indefinitely.

Notes from the hardware

• A SUBLIME Pro uses two bus addresses — one for its buttons, one for its small screen — so it appears as two devices.
• Keypads ship pre-addressed. If two collide, the conflict is invisible in the protocol and cannot be fixed by re-addressing alone: see docs/address-conflicts.md.
• The vendor specification is wrong in three places; the differences are documented in docs/BE3-protocol-findings.md.

Support

Issues: https://github.com/Ctrlable/ctrlable-be3/issues