I’m late to the party here, just got a pair of Curtain 3. They work totally fine via bluetooth with my phone via the Switchbot app, I don’t have a Switchbot hub for them, but I did set up a Raspberry pi via HACS as a remote Home Assistance node.
Even controlling them directly on the raspberry pi without Remote HA through HACS (i.e. just using straight Switchbot Bluetooth) the pair doesn’t seem to quite work in tandem. They’re slow to respond (5 sec dfelay usually), and almost never reply at the same time, often only 1 will respond at all. I tried to group them and tried to control them independently, only 1 will respond at a time…
FWIW I have a Switchbot Blind Tilt about 3x as far away as the Curtain 3 and it works through HA without issue. Not a Switchbot API thing because it’s using BT.
I was also getting slow reaction times when using Raspberry Pi’s internal Bluetooth. IIRC, the reason is that the built-in Bluetooth on Raspberry Pi communicates over some slow bus and the bandwidth is also shared with something else, so you night need to wait until it is available.
Solutions:
a. Buy an external (probably USB) Bluetooth dongle. There is somewhere list of HA-recommended dongles.
b. Use ESPHome’s BLE proxy (called Bluetooth proxy, but is supports just BLE).
Freaking genius!!! So much frustration setting Bluetooth proxies set up, and still not be able to see paired curtains as one. All this time I could have gone the Smart things all along!!! Thank you from the future!!! Two minutes and I had all of my curtains in HA
While I welcome forks, I don’t see the improvements there. The documentation is slightly reworded, the action is renamed, and the legacy action is removed.
The v6_ prefix isn’t just a branding. It prevents name collision. Of Home Assistant adds an action named the same as in the add-on, it will collide. Maybe not a big deal there, but I tend to avoid it in general. The collision can still be annoying, as the parameters might differ slightly, e.g., the speed probably wouldn’t be of range 0–255. With unique prefixes, this cannot happen, and you can transition to HA’s implementation later.
The legacy action is there for backward compatibility, and I don’t plan to remove it. But I understand that it doesn’t make much sense in a fork that renames the action in the first place.
Yeah, the last activity is older, because the add-on just does it’s job, at least for me. Yes, there could be some improvements, e.g., support for groups. I don’t need it, but PRs are welcome.
OK, maybe I forgot one PR I received when I was on vacation.
Today i created a card for my curtains(not switchbot) and shared it on my github. just wanted to drop it here in case someone is searching for something like this
What are the differences between the single and double SwitchBot Curtain 3 packages? I believe the double allows you individually control each while also exposing an entity to open/close both curtains, which seems easy to reproduce in HA. If one can find two single units for the same price as a double, are there any reasons (no matter how small) not to get the singles?
I’m looking to get two robots to open a two-panel curtain, connected via Bluetooth.
