Gabb Wireless for Home Assistant

Bring your kids' Gabb watches and phones into Home Assistant. Sign in with your Gabb parent account and each device on the account shows up in HA with GPS location, battery level, online status, and device details. Put the kids on the map next to everyone else, get a low-battery notification before school pickup, or trigger automations when a watch comes home.

There are two ways to run this:

1. Home Assistant integration (recommended): installed through HACS, set up entirely from the HA UI. No broker, no containers, no YAML.
2. Docker MQTT publisher: a standalone container that publishes device data to an MQTT broker with HA auto-discovery. Useful if you already run everything through MQTT or want the data outside Home Assistant.

Both talk to the same Gabb (Smartcom FiLIP) API. Pick one; running both will give you duplicate devices.

Heads up: this project uses an undocumented API owned by Smartcom. It is not sanctioned by Gabb and could break or violate their EULA. Use at your own risk. None of this would exist without the API work in woodsbw/gabb. Thanks @woodsbw!

How to install

HACS is the recommended way to install. It handles updates for you and takes about two minutes. If you don't use HACS you can install manually, and the Docker MQTT publisher further down remains an option for MQTT-centric setups.

HACS (recommended)

1. Open HACS in Home Assistant.
2. Click the three-dot menu in the top right and choose Custom repositories.
3. Paste https://github.com/jaycollett/gabbwireless_mqtt, set the type to Integration, and click Add.
4. Search HACS for Gabb Wireless and click Download.
5. Restart Home Assistant.
6. Go to Settings → Devices & services → Add integration, search for Gabb Wireless, and sign in with the username and password you use for the Gabb parent app or web portal.

That's it. Every device on your account appears under Settings → Devices & services → Gabb Wireless. When a new version is released, HACS shows the update alongside your other integrations.

Manual installation

1. Download the latest release and copy the custom_components/gabb_wireless folder into the custom_components directory of your Home Assistant config (create it if it doesn't exist).
2. Restart Home Assistant.
3. Go to Settings → Devices & services → Add integration, search for Gabb Wireless, and sign in.

You'll need to repeat step 1 by hand for each update, which is why HACS is the better route.

What you get

For each watch or phone on the account:

Entity	Notes
Device tracker	GPS location, shows up on the map and works with zones and the person entity
Battery	Percentage, with history and long-term statistics
Last GPS fix	Timestamp of the most recent location report
Online	Connectivity status
Phone number, IMEI, firmware, device type, model	Diagnostic section of the device page

Fields the API returns that don't warrant their own entity (ICCID, serial number, app build, and so on) are available as attributes on the device tracker:

{{ state_attr('device_tracker.gabb_device_12345', 'iccid') }}

Options

Click Configure on the integration to change how often it polls Gabb. The default is every 5 minutes; the minimum is 60 seconds. Polling faster drains the watch battery quicker and hits Gabb's servers harder, so leave it at the default unless you have a reason not to.

If your Gabb password changes, HA will prompt you to re-authenticate rather than silently going stale.

Docker MQTT publisher (alternative)

The original form of this project: a container that polls the Gabb API and publishes to your MQTT broker using Home Assistant device-based discovery. HA picks the devices up automatically through the MQTT integration.

docker run \
  -dit \
  --name gabb-mqtt-publisher \
  --restart unless-stopped \
  -e GABB_USERNAME=<WEBSITE_USERNAME> \
  -e GABB_PASSWORD=<WEBSITE_PASSWORD> \
  -e MQTT_BROKER=<YOUR_MQTT_BROKER_IP> \
  -e MQTT_PORT=1883 \
  -e MQTT_USERNAME=<YOUR_MQTT_USER_NAME> \
  -e MQTT_PASSWORD=<YOUR_MQTT_BROKER_PASSWORD> \
  -e REFRESH_SECONDS=600 \
  ghcr.io/jaycollett/gabbwireless_mqtt:latest

Environment variables

Env	Function
GABB_USERNAME	The username you use to log into your Gabb Wireless web portal.
GABB_PASSWORD	The password you use to log into your Gabb Wireless web portal.
MQTT_BROKER	Hostname or IP of your local MQTT broker.
MQTT_USERNAME	The username for the MQTT account on your broker.
MQTT_PASSWORD	The password for the MQTT account on your broker.
MQTT_PORT	(optional) Broker port. Defaults to 1883, or 8883 when MQTT_TLS=true and no port is set explicitly.
MQTT_TLS	(optional) Enable TLS to the broker. Default false.
MQTT_CA_CERT	(optional) Path inside the container to a CA cert file used to verify the broker. Defaults to the system trust store.
MQTT_TLS_INSECURE	(optional) Disable broker hostname verification. Default false. Only for local testing against self-signed certs.
REFRESH_SECONDS	(optional) Poll interval in seconds (minimum 60). Overrides REFRESH_RATE when both are set.
REFRESH_RATE	(optional) Legacy 1..4 ladder: 1 = 5 min, 2 = 10 min, 3 = 30 min (default), 4 = 1 hour. Ignored when REFRESH_SECONDS is set.

Sensor whitelist

To keep Home Assistant's entity list manageable, only these device fields are published as individual sensor entities:

batteryLevel, latitude, longitude, gpsDate, online, phoneNumber, imei, firmwareVersion, deviceType, model.

Everything else the API returns rides as a JSON attribute on the per-device device_tracker entity, readable with state_attr() as shown above.

Healthcheck and failure handling

The publisher touches /tmp/gabb_heartbeat after every successful iteration, and the container HEALTHCHECK verifies the file has been touched within the last 90 minutes. If you set REFRESH_SECONDS above 5400, extend the -mmin value in the Dockerfile.

After 10 consecutive failed iterations (expired credentials, sustained API outage) the container exits with code 1 and relies on your restart policy to recover and re-authenticate from scratch.

Development

Publisher tests:

pip install -r requirements-dev.txt
pytest tests/ -v

Integration tests run against a real Home Assistant install:

pip install pytest-homeassistant-custom-component
pytest tests_integration --asyncio-mode=auto

CI runs ruff, both test suites, hassfest, and HACS validation on every PR. Pushing a manifest.json version bump to master creates the GitHub release automatically, which also kicks off the Docker image build, so HACS users and Docker users update from the same release.

Credits

API reverse engineering by @woodsbw. MQTT publisher and Home Assistant integration by @jaycollett.