Hello everyone, first post here after a successfull begining with HomeAssistant, so please be patient. I’ve been tinkering with HomeAssistant on a Raspberry Pi 4B for a couple of weeks now.
My main objective with HomeAssistant is to reduce/remove my reliance on lots of apps and cloud services by controlling everything from one source. I do not currently have many devices, mostly Philips Hue and a variety of smart plugs. Usual media devices, TV, set-top box and surround sound amp, these are controlled with a Harmony Hub. Plus one rather dumb vertical blind motor, which can be controlled with a Sonoff RF Bridge as well as buttons on the housing and a two button keyfob.
So all of these were working independantly and I wanted to simplify. So to date I have flashed the smart plugs with Tasmota and these are now all controllable with Home assistant. I have automations running that duplicate what I had before, except the blind motor
The dumb blind motor that I’ve had for a while, it is my intention to replace this at some point, but it is providing me with some “interesting” learning about HomeAssistant! When I first got the blind motor, the configuration was straight forward: pair the fob with the motor, set up eWeLink, connect with the Sonoff RF Bridge, set up the schedule(s), all was good.
Now I want to integrate the motor into HomeAssistant, The RF Bridge is a V1 and I’ve flashed it with Tasmota and Portisch, I have sniffed the codes from the fob and successfully used the codes to add a MQTT switch in configuration.yaml. The switch works fine from the entity dialog, when I “open” or “close” but I cannot add this to an automation, I need this entity to be a device???
In my current “test” automation I use Call Service with the MQTT payload which works, but this call does not reflect in the MQTT switch status. This dumb motor is really dumb, in that it does not return ANY status information so I have no idea what state the blinds/motor is in.
I’ve read lots of documents but am really stumped how to get this working. I’m guessing I’m looking at this the wrong way round or have not made the right connections in my head as yet!