A rambling note on these devices after 3 years of usage of 10 of these.
The only odd thing is that they go into ‘ghost’ mode every few months where they appear to be reporting connectivity but are unresponsive to any commands.
If anyone has any insight on this behaviour I would be very interested to see it.
I installed 10 of these three years ago driving thermal blinds into a house we had just purchased.
Will ultimately use them to drive Vertical Blinds as move over to them in the next year or so.
They have done extremely well and been pretty reliable.
The only hardware issue I have is that the mounting does not allow for adjustments once fitted. During the first year most of the chains driving the blinds stretched requiring either surgery on the chain ( made a million times easier by the purchase of a chain tool that made cutting and repairing blind chains much easier) the other way is to remount the controller which means making more holes for the screws in the window fittings.
The only other real issue is that they will run for several months solid as a rock, then start ignoring instructions to open/close all the time reporting they are connected and reporting battery levels.
So to zigbee2MQTT they appear connected but are unresponsive.
The only way to resolve this is to re-pair the zigbee connection.
Not a big issue in of itself but means if I were to leave the house for an extended period a blind may not open or close and would require physical interaction to reset it.
Difficult if I am overseas and now the house no longer looks lived in and active.
I can build into the Node Red control to check on the status of the controller and report discrepancies at least.
The batteries in the blind controllers last many months, and I have a usb battery and use that to charge each device when needed.
I have a monitor on the batteries and most of the blind controllers will be automatically recharged to 80% when they hit 30% in an attempt to reduce stress on the batteries.