Question about Zigbee roller shutter switches

Configuration Zigbee
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1

Hello Community! :slight_smile: This is my first question on this forum!

I’ve wanted to retrofit roller shutters in my house to Home Assistant. For this, I shortlisted the following two products.

  1. Bosch Smart Home Light/ roller shutter control II
  2. NodOn SIN-4-RS-20 roller shutter module

Considering that I don’t need the device manufacturer’s app, I went for the option 2 (NodOn).

From my experience, the only downside is, the “position” is erased upon power outage. So, if the mains power was briefly out while roller shutter was at position 0 (= fully closed), then the position is reset to 100 while the shutter is still closed. Upon restoring power, the physical roller shutter switch won’t respond either.

The only workaround I found so far is, manually tapping the cover widget on HA and then setting the slider to anything between 100 and 0. This is the only way to get the motor moving.

A challenge I see against automating this is, Zigbee gateway doesn’t immediately/always recognize the unavailability of the roller shutter controller.

Questions:

  1. If you have experience with the Bosch device, did it also behave the same way? (I could have ordered one and tested by myself - but I’m trying to be considerate of the sellers and avoid unnecessary returning)

  2. Can you recommend a similar device which doesn’t have the said limitation, but also provides terminals for manual control?

  3. If you also ran into the same issue, did you find any workarounds to address the issue? Any suggestion is welcome.

Thanks for your time!
Shaakunthala

Additional details:

  • I’m using the Sonoff Zigbee stick 3.0 with Home Assistant
  • My roller shutter’s motor automatically switches off (built-in to the motor) when it’s fully closed or fully open.
2

Don’t know if this will work, but you might try Variables+History from HACS, which would allow you to store the last position of the roller each time it changed. Then you could have an automation to run on restart and reset the roller to it’s current position (so in fact it doesn’t move, but at least it knows where it is).

A bit of a bodge, but you’ve already spent the money on the NodOn, so…

Welcome to the forum, by the way. :grinning:

3

Thank you for suggesting the hass-variables component.

I took a closer look at the device log [screenshot]. Here’s what I noticed:

  • During power off-on cycle, it did not detect the device going offline. So we cannot use device online status to trigger an automation.
  • It jumped from closed status to opened status without being triggered by cover.open_cover service or cover.set_cover_position service.

Screenshot_20240804-205857
Screenshot_20240804-205857806Ă—1795 136 KB

With your suggestion I’m hoping that I can create a sensor based on the second bullet point:

If the device status changed to opened without a trigger, then return the last known values for status and position.

Now, my next question is, can we overwrite the existing values for status/position within Home Assistant?

I will test this and share the results here.

Do you know a better product? Or do you know of any other downsides of NodOn?
If so feel free to share. :slight_smile:

Thanks!
Shaakunthala