I live in the US and just had some Rollease Acmeda motorized blinds (with RF remote) installed.
I’d love to get the Automate Pulse hub and do what people are doing in this thread, but it seems that is a product available only in Australia. Has anyone found a place to buy it in the US?
If not using the Hub, has anyone successfully controlled their blinds using anything else, like the RM Pro+?
I live in the US and have the Automate pulse hub. I purchased it from the Shade Store (it is a rebranded version). It works great with both Alex and IFTTT (except when the rollease service goes down).
Just received my hub. It installed nicely and works great from the app. Was able to connect to the IFTTT service but can’t work the triggers because my scenes won’t populate into IFTTT.
@ddkilburn Unfortunately, a known “cloud” issue they’re working on. You’ll need to contact Rollease support to have them reset your account manually so the scenes load.
Also, anytime you change scene names you’ll need to have them reset it again. See backposts on this forum for some history on it.
A bit of a delay here, as the company who were installing our blinds went bust and left us with half an installation. But I have enough to experiment with what we’ve got; will try to get around to something soon!
I wrote a HASS component for this using serial about a year ago, but its a bit unstable, I haven’t worked out how to handle collisions or verify a command was received. I also have to poll the status of each device to get their position, because the serial protocol only communicates status changes done through serial.
My biggest frustration has been the API doesn’t allow for a way to query connected devices, you need to hard code the devices.
Shall I setup a GitHub project? if others would like to improve it.
@Gavc - im interested in trying this component but can i ask, why over serial instead of wifi? and how are you connecting to your server? usb to rs484 or if raspi - gpio to rs484?
Thanks for the prompt response… If at all possible, would you be able to add a pic of your cable… just want a better understanding of what i would need to do with the RJ11… I assume this is the type of USB to serial you have used, with the adapter allowing for + and - connection to an RJ11, but are they the only two wires i would need to connect?
The code is not ready for serious use yet, by any means, but I have now managed to raise and lower my Rollease blinds from Home Assistant.
Basically, it’s a script which connects to the Hub over RS485 and to an MQTT broker. Position updates from the blinds are fed to MQTT, and commands from MQTT can be used to make the blinds open, close, stop or move to a particular position.
It may still be a while before it’s properly tidied up and usable as a Hass.io plugin - I’m not too proud of the code yet - but it’s becoming fun to play with. Any developers who have Python 3.7 and aren’t frightened of asyncio are welcome to have a look and suggest improvements!
OK, I have it running here as a Hassio addon, and it’s working nicely. I woke up this morning and opened all the blinds in the house using the HomeAssistant iphone app. This means I can start thinking about things like sunset-based automations, and opening the blinds when there’s motion in the room after sunrise.
If anyone wants to try it and has the necessary hardware, you can install it as a local add-on as per the add-on tutorial. Just copy the contents of the git repository into a local add-on directory.
The main things still to do are to make it more robust if there are errors, blinds going offline, etc and to make it available as a proper add-on. I’ll probably eventually split it into two git repositories: a separate rollease2mqtt package that others can use, and a homeassistant-rollease one with the add-on configuration.