I’m looking to add a roller shade motor to my smart home. It’s a large-ish (74") cellular black out shade with a nylon endless cord loop(no beads). I think those details negate several on the market. Ryse and Aqara make them, but neither supports the nylon cord loop.
I did find a couple by Zemismart and Moes(?). I imagine these are similar products, probably coming from the same factory. Website/products are a little confusing, but they do offer Tuya/Zigbee variants (would my Hue hub act a hub for these?). Both support the cord loop, and the price is nice. However I noticed the Zemismart says it won’t work with large shades (over 2kg). I have no idea how heavy the shade is, but it’s a pain to take on and off.
I think the winner will be Soma. The latest version of their product does support the cord loop (I don’t think ver 2 did), and there’s even extra consideration in their software for that. Only issue is the current connectivity is bluetooth. Though supposedly thread is built in and will be available as a future firmware update. I am awaiting confirmation of that fact. Though I normally wouldn’t buy based on future feature promises, it will mostly be set on a schedule anyways. As nice as it is to have everything in one home platform, my doorbell (Logitech) is HomeKit only and that’s been fine.
Do not try to motorize the cord, just replace the mechanism with a motorized tube, something like this:
There are more brands with similar (if not the same) system. Very easy to install and use. There are also less expensive RF variants that intagrate via a cheap local wifi bridge.
I’ve certainly see those. I’m not sure those would work for what I have. We don’t have roller blinds, it’s a cellular shade. It probably operates similarly, but the couple times I’ve had it down (which is a big pain to do), I couldn’t quite figure out how to disassemble the mechanism to install a motor (though I didn’t spend too much time on it). But it being an inside mount, there’s no wiggle room at the top if adding additional hardware would add 1/2". Plus do these even adjust out to 74"?
I do not have the Matter versions, but the cheaper RF ones. Even though they use RF to talk to the wifi bridge, they use two way c9mmunication. They report their state back.
So when operated by a normal remote they update when they stop moving. If those network boadcast messages do not get through, after some time the state is still synced, it just takes a bit longer.
The battery reporting is quite good compared to some other devices. I use a battery reporting blueprint to receive notifications when to charge. The battery lasts months, even after four years of dayly use now.
I have two blinds on continuous power, those are totally care free.