@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.
I have still no response apart from we are working on it, so I must not be alone, panels were working fine before the update with both devices never dropping bellow 80%, but since the update they report not plugged in.
My Tilt 2s are all on solar on 2.3.1 and 100% all the time. If your battery drops to even 80% on solar you don’t have enough light .
Anyway, device issues are a task for the device manufacturer, not Home Assistant 
I had the same issue when I updated the firmware on a few of them months ago. Even though the solar panels always kept the devices at 100%, I noticed these were continuously dropping as if they weren’t being charged. Seems to be a bug in the firmware - I factory restored the devices that were affected and they immediately started charging again.
@ Bremdan, I specifically asked here to see if anyone else had the problem, why this is home assistant, this is hardware/soma shades 2 post. So yes this is the right place to discuss this.
thanks for the suggestion Robert, ill have a try when I have time on sunday.
@brendan I haven’t tried the new BLE features in HA yet. But if that is something that could work reasonably well then I think we could do some sort of direct integration. Unfortunately the way BLE works with devices that have to make actual connections this will likely be a lot slower than through Connect. From what I’ve read it seems that at the moment all this new BLE thing is meant for is mostly tracking. Meaning that active connections are probably not well supported if at all. We could get motor position and battery levels with just scanning ADV packets but for motor control you would need active connections for sure. We are just about to release a new version of Connect based on the ESP32. That new version could be better than the one based on Raspberry Pi available now. What were the issues you were having specifically? I would very much like to see if we can fix those in both the old and the new Connect.
This solar panel not charging issue is new to me. I don’t personally handle support much any more so maybe it is so rare that support hasn’t brought the issue up with me. But if more than one person here has seen it then it can’t be that rare. If you could tell me the hardware you have (Tilt, Shades 1 or 2) and what version you upgraded from I would like to take a look at possibly recreating that issue here. I’m not sure how that would even happen since we don’t really disable charging in firmware ever in any version. It should be possible in theory on newer hardware but we’ve never seen a reason to even try that.
Ooh, I like the sound of this. Will it be something we can flash onto an ESP32 ourselves?
@ratsept
The bluetooth Integration supports active connections, so this would definitely work. It works with locks as well so if you need secure connection that also works.
If you could look at it, that would be amazing as Bluetooth Proxy is being worked on for active connections too, meaning any ESPHome device will work like a Bluetooth adaptor once completed.
I am no good at coding, but more than happy to be a guinea pig for testing it.
Switchbot and many others already work well with Bluetooth Integration as well as many lights and Xiaomi Bluetooth devices.
As the blinds have to make a direct connection to the connect anyway, it shouldn’t be too much slower. Using the app is painfully slow though admittedly.
@Dullage At the moment we haven’t made the binary nor the code publicly available. I think what I could do is make public the part of code that implements the HTTP API. That is the part HA users (and most integrators) need anyway. We are still talking to Apple about HomeKit and we also want to implement Matter in this codebase which probably makes publishing binaries and code impossible. But honestly there are already awesome projects out there that would have almost the same functionality. https://github.com/shmuelzon/esp32-ble2mqtt works quite well - I have tested that myself and while it does sometimes have crashes it recovers quickly and with HA it was perfectly usable.
@brendan I will have to look into that. A direct integration would be very nice but it would also be a lot of work to make that. While the Connect integration is already mostly done and working. I would like to add MDNS autodiscovery to the current integration and maybe a few other small changes but with the number of users we currently have on HA I can’t really justify spending too much time on this. We are working on a bigger motor that will be based on all new hardware and since that will run on the newer nRF52840 chip we’ll probably rewrite parts of the BLE connection code to make direct integrations easier as well. The new chip should also support Zigbee and Thread so in time it will most likely be possible to just use our motors with any standard hub/gateway supported by HA.
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@ratsept
If you are looking at the current integration, there is an issue with position for tilt motors. It reports 50% open when the blind is 100% open and at 100% it is actually fully closed in the opposite direction to 0%. This is not how the App works and is not how the Homekit Integration sees it, so must be a bug in the current Soma integration.
This issue started about 6 months ago. Expected behaviour is 100% to be fully open. Actual behaviour is if 0% is closed up, 100% is closed down, but HA registers 100% as an open position. This needs addressing also