New updates and improvements to Seam.
This week, we’re excited to announce that we’ve released real-time events for Yale and August devices within the North American region. That is, if you control your devices using the Yale Access app, you should now notice a massive improvement in how quickly you receive events relating to your device unlocking or changing online status. For devices outside of North America, we are working with Yale’s APAC and EMEIA teams to bring this enhancement later on.
The August-Yale integration is one of our oldest and has relied from the start on plain old polling to update device status and events. That meant that when a lock operation (such as an unlock) took place, it would take a few minutes for the event to be emitted from the Seam API to your server. Furthermore, as the number of Yale devices connected via Seam grew larger, we further decreased polling frequency to avoid flooding Yale’s server (fun fact: Seam’s Yale largest connected partner!).
Last spring, our friends at Yale informed us that real-time events would become available for Seam to consume and relay. We were thrilled and jumped at the opportunity to implement this enhancement for our customers. Not only does it improve the overall Yale-Seam integration experience, but it also ensures that our Yale friends can sleep soundly at night.
we began rolling out real-time events in late June. Given the importance of reliable events, we only slow rolled this out to more customers in July. As of August, we’re making this enhancement broadly available to all our customers, at no extra charge.
The following events are currently available:
lock.locked
lock.unlocked
device.connected
device.disconnected
We are also working on adding additional events for access code creation operations and device metadata updates, such as a user changing a device name.
As some Yale owners may recall, in May of 2023, Assa Abloy sold its Yale North American assets to Fortune Brands. As a result of this transaction, all Yale users outside of North America were migrated to a new backend accessible via the Yale Home app. For all intents and purposes, this is effectively a completely different integration. We are currently working with the Yale Home team to add support for real-time events and will release this at a later time.
connect_webview.login_succeeded
and connect_webview.login_failed
—to notify you whenever a Connect Webview completes. This will also create a more consistent developer experience with the events you receive from the iFrame-embedded Connect Webview.can_program_offline_access_codes
capability flag. If you are not familiar with offline access codes, check out our Managing Offline Access Codes documentation.event_description
to the payload for all events. It’s a human-readable string that tells you what the event is about and saves you a trip to our docs.lock.access_denied
event to indicate when an incorrect access code is entered multiple times in a row on a smartlock device. This is only available on Kwikset devices at the moment.automatic
value for lock_method
events, which means that we now make it clearer when a lock automatically relocks after an unlocking operation.location
field for unmanaged
devices. This enhancement can make it easier to identify where a device is located and whether it should be converted to managed
./locks/get
endpoint. If your code uses it, you will begin to see a warning.set
, despite not actually being set on the device. After weeks of investigation, we’ve identified the issue as a false positive status reported by the Schlage API. The good news is that we know how to identify this and have since implemented a fix that automatically recreates the code. We’ve seen a vast reduction in Schlage related access codes errors.lock.unlocked
events on Kwikset devices didn’t reliably add the seamapi
unlocking method to the event payload. We’ve improved the logic to make this detection more reliable.This week, we’re thrilled to announce the release of our new device capability flags. Compared to the legacy capabilities_supported
, these new flags provide far more granularity on what a specific device can do. They’re also computed in real time for each device to ensure timely knowledge of a given device instance’s functions. For example, these flags correctly detect the presence or lack of an accessory that is required for a specific function, such as an accessory keypad for programming online access codes.
For this feature launch, we are releasing the first four capability flags across all providers and existing devices that we support.
1# Get the device. 2device = seam.devices.get( 3 device_id="11111111-1111-1111-1111-444444444444" 4) 5 6# Confirm that the device can remotely lock. 7if device.can_remotely_lock: 8 # Perform the lock operation. 9 seam.locks.lock_door(device_id=device.device_id)
We recommend that you begin migrating to these new flags because they will ensure that your applications correctly reflect the state and functions of a device.
To get started:
This week, we are super excited to release our official Honeywell Thermostat integration! Along with Ecobee and Nest thermostats, you can now connect and control all Honeywell Resideo thermostats and control them through our SDKs, Seam-CLI, and the Seam Console.
Our office has a number of Honeywell thermostats. With the winter weather overtaking typically sunny California, we can confirm that the Seam CLI has been handy to crank up the heat on the Honeywell thermostats without having to get up and walk over to the actual thermostat…
Some resources to get you started with this integration:
As always, this integration will be in beta for the next couple of weeks; though we’ve thoroughly tested this integration, if you see any inconsistencies or bug, please let us know and we’ll patch issues right away.