For a new project I am considering purchasing some motorized roller blinds. These rollers will have “dumb” 120V/240V motors that come with a 4-core cable (earth, neutral and two switched lives, one for up and one for down). No other automation or wireless system of any kind.
Normally these connect either to wall switches (hard wired) or to commercial home automation system relays like for Creston, Control4 etc. I do not have any of that and want to use Home Assistant instead, and perhaps a wireless wall switch.
So, the 4-core cable from the motors need to connect to some kind of relay(s) and that relay needs to connect to Home Assistant.
Any thoughts on what kind of relay or device I can use for this? Looking for specifications and suggestions (I’m an in the UK).
I’d suggest the Shelly 2.5. You wire it between the physical up/down switches and the roller motor. The only other requirement is that your roller must be within wifi coverage.
@dvdavide great, shelly2.5 is certainly the most likely option. One for each blind.
I am now trying to figure if I can also somehow connect either wired or wireless wall switches.
The tricky part is that I want to split the blinds in two groups and connect two wall switches, one that operates each group (blinds in each group going up and down together at the same time when operated from the wall switch)
When the shelly is integrated into HA it exposes the switches it’s physically connected to as binary sensors, so if you want you can use the state change to trigger an automation that will roll up/down the other rollers in the group
Oh so you are saying that out of the 5 shellys (one for each blind), only two are connected physically to wall switches. Then via HA configure the binary output of each of the two switches to operate groups of blinds? That sounds interesting - i thought that one wall switch connected to a shelly2.5 would correspond to the one blind connected to it, and it’d only operate that one blind (even without HA).
I guess i could always use two separate wireless switches (e.g. via a sonoff each) to operate groups of blinds via HA.
You can do it both ways, one does not exclude the other.
The wall switch connected to the shelly moves only the roller it’s connected to, if you don’t process it through HA. However, when you add the Shelly to HA you get a few more entities in addition to the cover entity, and one of the entity is a binary sensor for each of the switch inputs. You can use the binary sensor state change to trigger the automation to move the other rollers. There might be some considerations on how to implement the automation, depending on the type of switch you are using (toggle or momentary)
The wireless switch follows the same principle, and as I said one solution does not rule out the other. If you have any doubts I’ll do my best to help.