Hey friends, I have my Velux windows and blinds integrated in Home Assistant via the Velux KLF200. Except for a slight delay in position updates the integration is pretty good.
What’s the benefit of this approach? What’s your reasons to go this route? Is it “just” the cost of the KLF200 or are there other reasons someone like myself could be interested in? Cheers!
@Larse Post some pictures of what you have done in case we can see anything obvious. Can you also give us a bit more detail can you see the device in the ESPHome integration and are the buttons visible and do you see entries in the logs?
@ThomDietrich For me it was the cost of the KLF plus at the time there was talk of the device locking up after an HA restart. It is probably the best solution if you have a few windows but shame it locks up.
Thanks for the answer! Just fyi, the lock-up issue was fixed some time ago and I can’t report any issues since I am using this setup. The cost of the KLF, yes that makes sense. I on the other hand have installed “only” three windows with rollers and opening motors, providing me with 6 individual remotes. The KLF200 was definitely worth its cost for me 
I currently have 4 of @thorou PCBs soldered up and working in home assistant with the ESPHome Builder Addon which I’m really happy with. Thanks again to @thorou for his guide!
The only issue i have found so far is that if i group all the covers into a single helper in Home Assistant and activate the helper to open or shut all the blinds in one go, only two of the four blinds reliably open or close.
At first i thought it might be because i had one power source for all the boards and sending out 4 concurrent signals might be overpowering the psu. However after setting up individual power sources the issue remains so i am pretty confident this is not the cause.
I have tried placing the the boards very close to each window and using this method i can intermittently get 3 of the 4 blinds to open.
Placing two of the PCBs a good way from the blinds and two very close almost always causes the two closer to activate, although not in every case. On a couple of occasions this configuration caused all four to work together but then went back to just the 2 closer ones routinely working.
This leads me to believe it it some kind of interference with the signal transmitted from the Velux PCB to the blind itself.
I was wondering if anyone else had noticed this issue with a setup that contains four or more blinds and if it occurs with the KLF200 also?
I guess the quick solution is to create a template that introduces a very short delay between calling each blind sequentially to activate which i will most likely implement.
If anyone has a more fix that is closer to the hardware i would be interested to know?
If not the hardware then perhaps the ESPHome config, maybe introducing a random few 100ms delay on each of the ESP8266s triggers.
My guess would be that the RF signals are interfering with each other as you have suggested. I have 4 blinds but have connected them to one remote so not the same as yours.
You could try either a HA automation that adds a delay between each blind or as you have posted a random delay in ESPHome. You could experiment with timing but I’d guess like you offsetting 100ms would be about right. I normally like to keep things like this controlled by ESPHome but I think in this case I’d have an automation in HA to open and close with a delay between each then the individual control is still instant. A HA automation would be quick and easy to set up and get the timing sorted, you could then transfer the timings to ESPHome if you desired.
I ended up creating a HA script that opens each cover one by one in sequence with one second delays between each cover being called.
I then created scripts to close and stop each cover in the same manor.
I then created a new cover template to represent all the blinds and applied each of the scripts to the templates: Actions on open, Actions on close & Actions on stop.
I used the original cover group helper that wasn’t working well to provide the general state and position of the combined existing covers.
When i want to open or close all the covers in one go i just use this new template cover.
Seems to be working well.
For 2x Velux remotes to be controlled by 1x Wemos D1 + a DHT22 for temp/humidity, what would your suggested pinout be? Rigged this up but getting unreliable results. Using the USB port to power the two which could be the problem?
TIA
Hi there, sorry to resurrect an old post of yours, but I was hoping you might be able to elaborate on exactly how you wired the 'sense wires on the ESP module to show state. I can see from the config code on your Github that three sense wires each connect to GPIO pins on ESP module, but where is the other end of the wire connected? Do they also require resistors to be inline?
I am using a Wemos D1 mini to control my Velux Skylight using ESPhome. It all works fine, but I’d love to include the open/closed state for automations.
Thanks in advance.
Per button, one GPIO pin (here: control) controls a transistor to drive the line low, and another GPIO pin (here: sense) is passively connected to the line with a 1kΩ resistor to detect button presses coming from the remote side.
I’ve also added a PDF schematic to the Github Release.
Thank you very much for the extra detail and the quick response.
