How to set percentage position of tilt and lift somfy blinds on RTS?

Third party integrations
1

Howdo.

I’ve recently installed 3 tilt and lift Somfy venetian blinds in the UK, each with an RTS motor and connected via Somfy Tahoma to my smart devices. In Home Assistant (core-2021.5.4, supervisor-2021.05.4, Home Assistant OS 5.13 on HA Blue with the Somfy Integration the blinds appear in my device list under manufacturer ‘Somfy’ and model ‘interior_blind_discrete_orientable’.

Lovelace shows an up/down/stop action button for each blind, and HA exposes the following attributes:

friendly_name: Blind 1
assumed_state: true
supported_features: 11
device_class: blind

I can set the position via open and close operations (eg):

service: cover.close_cover
target:
  entity_id: cover.blind_1

but nothing happens when I try to set the position or tilt, with

service: cover.set_cover_position
target:
  entity_id: cover.blind_1
data:
  position: 50

or

service: cover.set_cover_tilt_position
target:
  entity_id: cover.blind_1
data:
  tilt_position: 50

The remotes bundled with the blinds allow me to set cover and tilt independently, and expose a ‘MY’ favourite position (which I have as cover closed / tilt open). I’ve seen it suggested in Reddit and here that sending a ‘stop’ signal when the blind is stationary will trigger the MY position, but again I get no response from

service: cover.stop_cover
data: {}
target:
  entity_id: cover.blind_1

It might be anecdotal, but it does appear that the blinds lag after I’ve sent a tilt attempt through HA. Whilst they don’t seem to react to the instruction, if I send another via the somfy app afterwards, they wait for about 20 secs before actioning the change. The remotes act immediately still.

Does anyone have any ideas on how I can access the percentage positions? Besides giving me better granular control (which I can already get via remote or Somfy app) it would also let me do more than just fully open or fully close the blinds.

Even if I could just toggle between blinds closed (cover down, tilt close) and the MY position (cover down, tilt open), this would avoid sending the blinds screeching all the way up over 20 seconds or so when all I want to do is see what’s outside.

Lastly, if I had to choose between tilt and cover/uncover channels, I’d far rather HA could control the tilt. Its quicker, quieter, uses less battery, and is more often what I want to do.

I saw GordonGekko’s post about doing this in Homekit, which suggests independent control of both operations were working in HA at the time. Not sure if that was IO or RTS, mind. In the UK, I’ve not found a supplier who will actually tell me which I’ll get until I unpack the boxes.

Thanks for any help you can offer.

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2

Follow up: tried just using the tilt open and close commands, and no response at all… Am wondering whether there’s any support for the tilt operation at all. Does anyone have the below working on a somfy RTS motor?

service: cover.open_cover_tilt
target:
  entity_id: cover.blind_1
3

Just updating for anyone stumbling across this thread later. I’ve been able to create actions in Home Assistant that toggle between louvres open and closed using the following:

  1. use the somfy app to create a ‘my position’ as blinds fully down, with the louvres tilted to the horizontal, and a.ddd this as a ‘favourite’ inside the app called ‘louvres open’
  2. Create another favourite with the blind fully closed (down and tilted shut) and call that ‘closed’
  3. Use automations in HomeAssistant to invoke those favourites (they come through to HA as ‘Scenes’) at start and end of day.

My installation has three blinds in the same room. In use, the messages originating within the Somfy Tahoma box don’t always seem to make it to every device, so I’ve added the following for failover support.

  1. Create a script that sends a message to each of the three blinds when I want to close them as a group, using a small delay between messages to improve the chance of each getting through. (see script below), and call this on the back of the automation that kicks off the close scene.
  2. Using this HACS integration, create a script that can set each blind to the ‘my position’ favourite, so that the louvres are open.

Through these combined, I can toggle between blind down louvres open and blinds down louvres closed and retain HA control of blind height (with louvres closed). The scripts I use are below:

Close the blinds

sequence:
 - service: cover.close_cover
   target:
     entity_id:
       - cover.blind_1
 - delay: '00:00:01'
 - service: cover.close_cover
   target:
     entity_id:
       - cover.blind_2
 - delay: '00:00:01'
 - service: cover.close_cover
   target:
     entity_id:
       - cover.blind_3

Open the louvres (with blinds remaining down)

sequence:
  - service: tahoma.set_cover_my_position
    target:
      entity_id:
        - cover.blind_1_2
  - delay: '00:00:01'
  - service: tahoma.set_cover_my_position
    target:
      entity_id:
        - cover.blind_2_2
  - delay: '00:00:01'
  - service: tahoma.set_cover_my_position
    target:
      entity_id:
        - cover.blind_3_2

These have worked reliably for a couple of months now. I’ve not yet found any way to set interim positions for tilt, and were I doing this again, I would only buy automatic tilt motors. We only lift the blinds to clean the windows so its not really worth it.

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