Soma Smart Shades 2

Thanks! Got some stuff to think about. :slight_smile:

I must have missed this, although in my case it seems I needed to update the firmware for the ‘Motor Speed’ setting in the app to appear. Much obliged.

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Anyone using these with fabric Roman blinds?

Yup, reasonably heavy one, thick heavy velvet-y material, few metres across. Although I do think the mechanism is perhaps geared, as it’s fairly light to operate by hand.

Does anyone get the following error in their logs from this integration?

Logger: homeassistant.components.soma.cover
Source: components/soma/cover.py:81
Integration: Soma Connect (documentation, issues)
First occurred: February 1, 2022, 21:01:49 (135 occurrences)
Last logged: 09:24:03

Connection to SOMA Connect failed

My device is online and I have no trouble controlling them when I need them, but it just seems like HA is having trouble maintaining the heartbeat or something.

Something I’ve just gotten into the habit of doing - when I had random connectivity issues/flapping a few years ago, so I’ve no idea if it was a fluke, or no longer relevant etc - but I still do it anyway, I believe it helped back when I saw issues and I rarely have issues now.

  • Enable SSH (Easiest way is to mount the SD card, create a blank ssh file in the boot. On my mac touch /Volumes/boot/ssh)
  • Put the SD card back in the Pi
  • SSH to the device

Username: pi
Password: SOMAConnect1

  • Set the wifi location (with raspi-config) country code
  • Disable wifi power saving:
sudo systemctl --full --force edit [email protected]

Add to the editor window:

[Unit]
Description=Set WiFi power save %i
After=sys-subsystem-net-devices-wlan0.device

[Service]
Type=oneshot
RemainAfterExit=yes
ExecStart=/sbin/iw dev wlan0 set power_save %i

[Install]
WantedBy=sys-subsystem-net-devices-wlan0.device

Disable wifi powersave:

sudo systemctl disable [email protected]
sudo systemctl enable [email protected]

Source: wifi - Make "iw wlan0 set power_save off" permanent - Raspberry Pi Stack Exchange

Then reboot, disable SSH, stop SSH and/or reboot.

EDIT: Does seem to help for me at least, tried wiping the previous, installed ‘stock’ left it running… then implemented the above changes, which are clear on a basic ICMP graph.

… I do have UniFi APs, however, they’re not especially great at not rolling out more bugs than they fix, especially with niche services like basic connectivity and recently DHCP. Although they do seem to be a little bit better with some of the most recent updates.

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I also use UniFi, so I wonder if that’s what’s causing the issues. Might need to see if I can just hardwire the SOMA Connect in to the network to see if that makes a difference.

thanks for sharing this above. Will try this out.

Has anyone else lost battery level sensors after upgrading to 2022.2?

I’m not sure if related to the SOMA Connectedfailed errors, but I reported that one here since at the time I was also having battery level sensor inconsistency. It’s in this submission here.

i have the connect and smartshades2 - HA cant call the service cover.open / close or position - not sure if this is due to a recent breaking change or not.

it seems to be a timeout issue

Any ideas?

I have the Connect and have been using it for a while. I’ve been working with a bunch of ESP-Home items and was thinking that maybe I could change from the raspberry pi to an ESP. Anybody know if ESP-BLE2MQTT is working with Soma Smart Blond motors?

@ratsept Would it be at all possible to host Soma Connect as a docker image? Or even a Virtual Machine? Been hitting my head against a wall trying but had no success in getting it to work as I’d much rather consolidate everything into one workstation and use my Pi for other projects. I’ve even tried emulating a Pi with things like Virtualbox and using the Soma Connect .img from the website but I’m not entirely computer-literate in that area and still can’t get anything to work. Have you heard of anyone having success?

It is something that we don’t support at the moment. But we are working towards making that possible in at least some way. So far we have though about trying to make the Connect software into a HomeBridge plugin or something similar. But with any co-hosted solution there will be the risk of something breaking since the way BLE is done in our software makes it quite fragile (but also very fast). The BLE stuff on the Pi is pretty bad to begin with so that is our biggest fear - all the problems for support that we would get from doing this. And I know we can say that this is a best effort thing and we will not provide official support but that will not stop people from writing to us.

Currently with the whole chip shortage and messed up supply chains we are also facing difficulties sourcing the Pi hardware so that is kind of making us look into this much more than before. I can’t give any specifics but I can say that we are working on this and I will do my best to make sure any updates on this will reach this community here as well.

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Hoping some can help me. I’ve been using the Soma blinds for over a year via the app no problem. Works fine. I’ve just sent up Soma connect on a Pi Zero. Installation worked fine. In home assistant i’ve added the integration and can see the cover. With options to open and close. Those buttons work but ignore the endstops set in the app so i have to manually stop it before it tears them apart. Also when I try to call a service to open cover and select the entity the automation does nothing.

All help is much appreciated.

Has anyone tried the new(er) Soma Connect 2.3.1 firmware?

It just will not connect to my Unifi wifi network. Just hangs on connecting. I did try setting the (new) wifi country (United Kingdom), to save me having to SSH in and edit it

Hurrah for still having 2.2.8 in my downloads folder, this seemed to connect ok first time.

Having a problem with the integration to HA since upgrading to 2022.4.1 - Was reporting the tilt % by default, but that has changed to “open” or “closed”, and the default value is the battery.

Now that Home Assistant has first class Bluetooth support, what will it take to get HA to directly interact with the Soma Smart Shades 2 devices? Eliminating the Soma Connect would remove one layer of complexity from many installations.

I see there is already a way to control the shades directly via MQTT, but that also requires an extra layer (MQTT).

Anyone aware of an existing solution? Or planning to either create a new HA integration similar to the existing soma integration (but not using the Connect)?

I’m not aware of an existing solution, but if anyone wants to create one, most of the hard work of discovering all the GATT service and characteristic UUIDs has been done in the homebridge-soma project.

I’m an idiot and completely forgot about the excellent work done here: https://github.com/devbis/ble2mqtt/blob/e39a4dd39c64ba3ca55273bfca04e6c8067487e9/ble2mqtt/devices/cover_soma.py

I’m going to noodle with that a bit over the weekend to see if I can get to anything useful.

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still no new firmware update for tilt or shade 2 yet? since last one my shades dont charge from solar

@Richi_Bowzer
The not charging from Solar is a fault I would suggest. I have been using Soma Tilt 2 for a while and both of mine have charged from Solar since Firmware version 2.2.6. Current version is 2.3.1 and still charging properly from Solar. Make sure your solar panel gets a few hours of direct sunlight a day, but if it is not charging, take it up with SOMA support directly. This forum is a Home Assistant forum, not a SOMA forum.

@ratsept Do you know if there will be an option made available to add the SOMA Connect blinds directly to Home Assistant via BlueTooth LE now Home Assistant has quite advanced BLE support. I find the current SOMA integration has issues and am having to rely on the HomeKit integration to get proper functionality.