What it looks like in the Home app

The desk itself, as a slider from 0 to 100%.

0% is the lowest height your desk is set to allow and 100% the highest. Those come from the desk, not from this plugin, so if you change the limits on the handset the ends of the slider follow.

"Hey Siri, set the desk to 100%." Or put it in an automation: up for the morning meeting, down at the end of the day.

Your memory positions, as switches — the same ones as on the handset. A switch is on while the desk is at its position, however it got there: from the Home app, from the memory key on the handset, or by the slider. Switch one on and the desk goes there, and the switch stays on; if the move is called off at the handset before it arrives, the switch goes back off. Switching it off on the way stops the desk. Only positions you have actually stored appear.

The child lock, as a switch. It shows the desk's real state, so if someone locks it at the handset the Home app knows.

Everything follows the desk, not just the other way round. Use the handset and the Home app keeps up. A desk out of range says No Response rather than showing you the height it had an hour ago.

What you need

| | | |---|---| | Desk | An Eliot with the Smart Dongle, or the Procontroller | | Homebridge | 2.0.0 or newer, on Linux | | Node.js | 22.18, 24 or 26 | | Range | Homebridge has to stay within Bluetooth range of the desk |

Linux only. The plugin talks to BlueZ over D-Bus, and macOS and Windows have no equivalent. A Raspberry Pi running Homebridge is the usual home for it. In a container, mount the host's /var/run/dbus/system_bus_socket.

One connection at a time. The dongle accepts a single Bluetooth connection. While Homebridge has it, the Eliot app on your phone cannot connect — and while the app has it, this plugin cannot.

Setting it up

1. Install it. In the Homebridge UI, go to Plugins, search for homebridge-eliot-smart-control and choose Install.

2. Give it a child bridge. In the plugin's ⋮ menu, choose Bridge Settings and turn the child bridge on. Bluetooth links drop and reconnect; in a child bridge that churn stays in its own process instead of unsettling your other accessories.

3. Find your desk. Open the plugin's Settings and press Scan for desks.

This is the part worth having help with. The dongle does not announce itself: it advertises under whatever name the desk was given in the Eliot app, carries no manufacturer name, and many units have nothing printed on them — in a scan list it sits among forty anonymous phones with nothing to tell them apart. The page looks for the Bluetooth service the desk actually speaks, so a result marked confirmed is the right device and not a good guess.

Press Use this next to yours, name it, and save.

Nothing found? Something else probably has it. Close the Eliot app and turn Bluetooth off on any phone that has been paired with the desk, then unplug the dongle for five seconds.

4. Add it to the Home app. The child bridge has its own QR code under Bridge Settings. Scan it the same way you paired Homebridge itself.

Settings

| | | | |---|---|---| | Name | required | What the desk is called in the Home app | | Dongle address | required | Filled in for you by the scan | | Idle refresh | 30 s | How often to ask a standing desk for its height. It reports by itself while moving, so this only catches the handset being used. 0 turns it off | | Memory switches | on | Offer your stored positions as buttons. Rename them in the Home app | | Child lock switch | on | Offer the desk's child lock | | Eco mode | leave alone | Eco mode and travel speed, as a pair. Takes effect after a reset, which the plugin asks for | | Automatic sit/stand | off | Move between two heights on a timer, during configured hours | | Ask again each day | off | Switch auto movement off at the end of each day, so it only runs on days you turn it on | | At the end of the day | do nothing | Move to standing or sitting height when the day's last window closes |

Or by hand, in config.json:

{
  "platform": "EliotSmartControl",
  "desks": [
    {
      "name": "Desk",
      "mac": "E5:11:22:33:44:55",
      "ecoMode": "off"
    }
  ]
}

Automatic sit/stand

Configure it, and the desk gains an Auto Movement switch. Nothing moves until you turn that on — the switch is the feature's on/off, so that turning it off is somewhere obvious rather than in a config file.

Once on, inside the hours you have set, the desk alternates between your sitting and standing heights. It always heads for whichever of the two it is further from, so a desk parked halfway still does the right thing.

A break between two windows pauses the timer. With 08:00–12:00 and 13:00–16:00, whatever is left at noon is still left at 13:00, and the slider holds still over lunch. If the desk would move within the warning time, it waits for the warning first. Overnight does not count as a break: each morning starts a full interval.

Moving the desk yourself restarts the timer. That is the snooze: when the warning says it is about to move and you are mid-call, nudge the desk with the handset and you have bought another interval. It is also simply true — the timer measures time spent at a height, and that clock restarts when the height does.

The countdown is on show, as a slider. Auto movement brings a Timer with it — a light whose brightness is how much of the interval is left before the next move. It fills to 100% when you switch auto movement on and runs down from there; a handset nudge or a move fills it again.

Dragging it is how you change the wait, and nothing else about it: halfway means half an interval left, all the way up buys a fresh one. All the way down moves the desk now, and skips the warning — you just asked for the move, so being told it is coming would be late. With auto movement off the slider sits at 0 and stays there, because there is no countdown to show. Set timerSlider to false if you would rather not have it.

Getting told about it takes one step you have to do yourself. HomeKit gives a plugin no way to send a notification, so the warning is a motion sensor called Desk Move Soon. Open it in the Home app, and under Status and Notifications turn notifications on. Nothing here can do that for you, and if you never do it the feature still works, silently.

Outside the configured hours nothing moves and no warning is raised — a phone buzzing at 17:05 about a move that will never happen is worse than silence.

Ask again each day turns the switch off at the end of the day, so it means "move me today" rather than "move me from now on". Without it the switch is a standing instruction, which is right for a desk used the same way every day and wrong for one that is not: a week away, and it has been cycling an empty room for five days. The day is remembered rather than timed, so a restart at 23:59 does not hand it a fresh one.

At the end of the day moves the desk once when the day's last window closes — to standing height, so the next morning starts on your feet, or to sitting height, to have it out of the way. Only with auto movement on and only on the configured days; not at a gap between windows, like lunch. If the desk is out of reach at the close, the move still happens when it comes back within a quarter of an hour, and not after that. A desk already there stays put.

Sitting and standing time

While auto movement is on and inside its hours, the plugin counts how long the desk stood at sitting height and how long at standing height. Outside those hours it counts nothing: a desk left up overnight is not somebody standing overnight. Anything halfway between the configured sitting and standing heights or above counts as standing.

The totals appear at the top of the plugin's settings page in the Homebridge UI — today, and the last 7, 30 and 100 days once the record reaches back that far — and not in the Home app, which has no sensor for a length of time. They are kept per day for 100 days, in eliot-stats-<address>.json in the Homebridge storage directory, and written every five minutes, so the page can trail the desk by that much.

When the desk stops by itself

The control box has its own anti-collision detection, and on a sensitive setting it does not take much: arms resting on the desk can be enough to end a move a centimetre in. The plugin then reports the move as stalled, which is accurate — the desk did stop — but says nothing about why, because from the outside a desk stopped by an obstruction and a desk stopped for any other reason look identical.

collisionSensitivity sets that threshold: high, medium, low, or leave to keep whatever the desk came with, which is the default. It is written to the control box when it differs from what the box is holding, once per connection.

It takes effect after a reset, the same way travel speed and eco mode do, and the plugin puts the desk into reset mode when it writes it — see below. And the setting belongs to the desk rather than to this plugin, so it stays changed until something changes it back.

Things worth knowing

Positions land exactly. The desk is handed a height and drives there on its own ramp, easing in and stopping within a couple of millimetres — the same mechanism as the memory buttons on the handset.

Stopping works, and coasts about 13 mm. There is no instant brake on a desk.

Using the handset during a move is safe. The control box gives the handset priority and stops; it never drives against you. A brief press pauses the move and it carries on, holding the button ends it, and the Home app settles on wherever the desk actually is rather than trying again.

An unset memory gets no button. If you store a new position on the handset, its button appears the next time the plugin connects.

Rename the switches in the Home app. They arrive as Memory 1…Memory 4 and the plugin names them only once, when it first creates them, so whatever you rename them to survives restarts.

A changed eco mode or sensitivity puts the desk into reset mode. The control box stores a new setting at once but keeps running whatever it was last reset with, and a value stored without a reset is lost if the desk loses power. So when the plugin writes one, it also switches the box to reset mode: the handset shows RESET, and the desk ignores everything else — memory keys and the Home app included — until you turn the handset left. It then drives to the bottom, re-homes and comes back up, and the new setting is live. This happens only when a setting actually changed, never on an ordinary reconnect. If the desk is stuck in reset mode and you cannot do the reset now, unplug it.

The idle refresh is only for what happens between moves. The control box streams its height for as long as it is driving itself, so nothing needs asking then. It is also why the poll must stay in seconds: a request arriving while the box is moving makes it abandon the move, which looks exactly like a desk that stops a centimetre after it starts.

The desk's own safety features are untouched. Anti-collision and the soft limits live in the control box. The plugin adds limits of its own on top: it gives up if the desk stops making progress, if a move takes longer than the distance can account for, or if the desk stops saying where it is.

When something is wrong

The scan finds nothing. Close the Eliot app and turn Bluetooth off on any phone that has been paired with the desk — closing the app does not always release the connection, and the dongle will not advertise while something holds it. Then unplug it for five seconds; it advertises immediately on power-up.

It connects, then drops. Check the signal. The settings page shows it beside each result and warns when it is weak; anything near -90 dBm comes and goes. Move Homebridge closer, or put a second one near the desk.

A dongle that stays silent while plugged in and powered is broken. Obvious written down, indistinguishable from a range problem in practice, and worth ruling out early by trying another one. It cost a day here.

The tile shows nothing, or its room cannot be changed. Restart the Home app, and the phone if that is not enough. The Home app keeps its own copy of what an accessory offers, and updating the plugin can change that — new switches, a sensor, a characteristic that was not there before. Until the app refetches it, the tile can sit blank or refuse to be edited while the plugin is publishing perfectly good values. Seen twice on one afternoon of changes, and resolved by restarting the app both times.

Installing or updating prints a wall of npm ERR! and works anyway. That is usocket, an optional native dependency of dbus-next, which reaches here through node-ble. Its build uses a version of node-gyp too old for Node 22 and fails with Cannot assign to read only property 'cflags'. Because it is optional, npm reports the failure and carries on, and nothing here needs it — dbus-next falls back to its own socket implementation, which is what this plugin has always run on. There is nothing to fix at this end; the noise comes from two dependencies further down.

"No D-Bus system bus" means BlueZ is not reachable: you are not on Linux, or you are in a container without /var/run/dbus/system_bus_socket mounted.

Everything looks right but nothing moves. Check the dongle is in the port marked F on the control box, not HS — that one is for the handset.

How it works

The Smart Dongle is a Lierda LSD4BT-E95ALSP001 presenting a transparent Bluetooth-to-serial bridge; behind it the control box speaks the Jiecang handset protocol. None of that was written down anywhere for this desk, so docs/PROTOCOL.md writes it down now: the framing, the command set, the measured travel speed and stopping distance, what the app's Automatischer Reset really does, and which parts are verified against hardware rather than assumed. Including the commands that turned out to do nothing, which is worth knowing too.

Credit where it is due: the serial protocol was reverse-engineered for other desks by phord/Jarvis and Rocka84/jiecang_desk_controller. Working out that an Eliot speaks it, what the Bluetooth side looks like, and the several commands those write-ups are missing is what this project added.

Licence

MIT