I am in the middle of figuring out motorized/automated roller shades and I’m wondering if there’s a way to a Broadlink or other device to “detect”/receive certain RF signals and send an event to Home Assistant.
Some of my requirements for this system I’m trying to put together include:
Run on 12v power. I have 2 conductor wire available at each window.
Have manual controls in each room that aren’t dependent on Home Assistant. The motors I’m looking at (Rollerhouse on Amazon) can be controlled via an RF remote. This fulfills this requirement.
Allow control from Home Assistant (and Alexa).
(Ideally) Have the open/closed state known in Home Assistant.
For #4, I realize I can do this using something like the Cover Time Based component, but if I’m understanding this all correctly that will only work when the command for the shades is initiated using Home Assistant. If the command to raise/lower the shades is done via the RF remotes in each room, Home Assistant won’t be aware of it, and thus the timed cover component won’t be used to calculate the position.
Is there a way around this, where I can intercept those RF signals and use them to send an event to HA to keep the status up to date? Or can anyone suggest an alternative that would allow local manual control of the shades in each room while also allowing HA to know status?
I don’t think you can use RF signals received by a Broadlink RM Pro to trigger automations in HA, however you can send RF signals from a Broadlink RM Pro using HA. Have you considered integrating an RM Pro into HA, then using any other device to trigger the shades through HA->RMPro. That way you’d be able to detect the state of the shades, have control of them through HA (so in lovelace and through other automations & scripts, etc) and could use literally any other device that HA knows as a trigger for them. Of course this means your current RF remotes would be useless though.
Yeah that’s kind of what I’m leaning toward. Using some basic z-wave remote so that all commands get routed through HA. Like a minimote, or maybe something simpler is out there? It would just need three buttons, and ideally look nice if you mount it in a holder on the wall or side table.
I don’t have the RF remotes yet, but I might buy them and just tuck them away in case this HA solution is ever not viable. I’m very wary of having major built-in stuff (like shades) that are dependent on complex software to operate. Much prefer to have a dumb redundant system as a fallback – like if I sell the house one day and take my HA system with me.
This video shows how to build a simple 433 RF to MQTT Gateway that is capable to decipher many RF protocols.
It does not use an RM4. Instead, he recommends a ESP32 + SX1278 LoRa board:
