I’ve been running the Zemismart ZM15B roller shade motor paired with Home Assistant via a SkyConnect Zigbee dongle, and it’s been a solid experience. Setup and pairing were straightforward, and once integrated, the motor performs reliably — no dropped commands or missed automations.
Operation is surprisingly quiet, which makes it feasible to schedule shade movements without disturbing anyone in the room. The built-in 800mAh rechargeable battery has kept up well, and its also possible to just keep the device plugged in. The package fits a standard 17/20/25/28mm tube sizes typical of roller shades with an assortment of adapters to ensure a good fit.
If ZigBee is part of your environment, this motor integrates cleanly and does exactly what it should: quietly and consistently. It’s a great way to add some smarts to your shades at a nominal cost. If ZigBee isn’t part of your setup, they make a WiFi version as well.
One caveat, if you don’t have a Tuya hub already, be sure to get the version with a remote. You’ll need the remote initially to set top/bottom, but then you can pair to your primary ZigBee controller and you’re set.
Edit: adding link to specific product, since there are several versions
Thanks for the writeup, I’m currently looking at installing automation-capable blinds on my skylights, and Tuya and Zigbee seem to be the only options for automation-capable motors. I’m running HA on a RPi5, and have a few Zibgee (Sonoff brand) smart thermometers around hooked up through a Sonoff dongle. I was a little confused about your mention of Tuya in the last paragraph; is this equivalent to a HomeKit device in your setup, so you’re going shade motor → Zigbee receiver → Tuya? I’m fairly new to home automation and am trying to parse out whether it makes sense to use my existing Zigbee (Sonoff) receiver, or try and add Tuya alongside it.
If it were me, I wouldn’t add a Tuya controller, if you don’t have it already. I have just the Home Assistant-branded zigbee dongle and I have the smart blind paired with that.
Apologies for the confusion. So, while some zigbee devices will expose all of their capabilities to whatever controller they pair with, some are a bit more obscure. For this one in particular, if you take it out of the box and pair with your (non-Tuya) zigbee dongle, you can tell it to go up, down, and stop…but crucially you can’t define an “open” and “closed” state. To do that (for this blind) you need either pair the blind to a Tuya controller, set the top/bottom and then re-pair to home assistant (or connect home assistant to Tuya), or (what I did) purchase remote control from the company. Then you can use the remote to define the “open” and “close” position and then pair it to your existing zigbee controller and be all set to use HASS alone.