I am looking for any advise on how to control some rollease acmedia shade motors that use 433.92Mhz using the ARC protocol. The shades have a controller that integrates with Alexa, and I have managed to string together HA calling an Alexa Routines which calls a Scene in the Rollease controller, but this is not elegant and provides no bidirectional feedback to HA.
I found a RFXcom controller post here Rfxcom rfxtrx433e usb on Synology in docker - #4 by outlander4000 that looks promising. Before I spend the money on this, does anyone know if this still works. The post above is old and I was wondering if there is a better or more modern way to achieve this. The manufacture of these shades white labels them for many other companies and If we could solve this for one it would help to grow the HA footprint.
ARC stands for Automate Remote Control, Automate being the sub-brand of Rollease Acmeda who make the motors. I was hoping it was an open standard but perhaps it’s not doing anything too fancy but I’m not knowledgable enough to work out what the OEM remote is sending. I recently just got some automated blinds and hence leading me here. I have the wifi hub coming soon, is it worth it? I have no interest in using Alexa, Siri or Google.
I use the hub for automations within the app. Mostly time of day schedules and for it’s integration with voice assistances (Alexa.) I would prefer to send commands via automations within home-assistant and just use the hub as the gateway for such commands. Given the communications are all encrypted from the app to the cloud and then down to the device, I cannot sniff the traffic to determine what type of payloads to send to the hub.
I recently purchased a device that can copy and replay RF transmissions and i couldn’t successfully do it with the Automate remote. From looking into it, I suspect it is using rolling codes like the fob for your car and garage door openers to prevent simple copy replay hacking and to avoid RF interference with neigbours who might have the same system.