I’m running HA 2022.9.6 and recently added a recommended bluetooth dongle to my setup.
Instantly HA found all my 7 switchbot curtains. I expected 4 but since I have 3 double sided curtains I guess those show up double.
It’s very nice that I can adjust them separately and see the battery levels for each, but opening them through automation is quite clunky now.
I noticed that sending an open/close command takes quite a while sometimes, it can even hang HA a bit. So when I want to open all 4 sides downstairs at the same time, well, now I do them one by one and with 10 seconds delay in between and that looks a bit silly.
I searched around a bit but couldn’t really find a way to do a double sided at once. The Switchbot app does have one BLE mac for both at the same time but I can’t manually add a BLE mac through the frontend.
When my pair of switchbot curtains were detected it detected left and right but if I control the left one, the right follows. Have you configured them as a pair in the Switchbot app ?
Try to create a cover group (Devices and Services, Helpers, add a new helper, group type) with the 2 devices you want to move aligned.
Then try to control this new helper instead of each individual devices.
Very strange, just checked and only 2 were discovered. Right one only controls right but left one controls both. If I disable the pair in the switchbot app they move separately
Since controlling the left one seems to be the obvious choice here I changed a little setting in my switchbot app: Slider Control Mode
I set it to Both sides instead of Single side and now indeed, controlling the left one opens/closes them at the same time!
To verify I switched back to Single side and now controlling the left one still also controls the right one as desired. Weird!
I guess I’ll play around with it more to see if it keeps working
I’ve updated the curtains to firmware version 6.0 → everything worked fine
A day passed by
I’ve updated HA to 2022.10.1 → only left curtain moves
I don’t know if it’s the combination that broke it, but I’m back to my weird automation with 30s delay between the curtain actions. Even though I’ve set the retry to 5x in the switchbot integration, I do find that stability is not the strongest point of BLE
Yes me too, there’s been a change in 2022.10. If you look at the forum for the release there’s a few posts about it. They are looking into trying to get double sided as an option.
Same thing at my end. tried a complete new install but it doesn’t work. one curtain always stays behind. Previously it worked really well. Both in Core as also before that through HACS. I guess not all changes make things better (initially)
I actually don’t mind the seperate control as it’s not a huge hassle to have automatons do both and I found some usecases to just open or close one (for example if a door is still open on one side of the curtain). So I do hope individual control will be perhaps something next to getting duo control back.
But I’ve mainly found that even with the new version switchbot remains exceptionally unreliable native. Even my Humidity sensor, that always worked fine, now loses it’s connection. Curtains seemed to work fine the first day or two, but also started to stop responding most of the time.
I think I will switch back to the ESP bridge between Switchbot and MQTT. It just continues to be to unreliable unfortunatly nativly. While the ESP solution seems very stable (can curtains remain working in duo)
