G’day guys
I have some perfectly good electronic blinds. Would be great to replace with Z-Wave ones, I hear too many stories about the RFXTRX433e not being entirely reliable, have corresponded with someone who has been reverse engineering the protocol and some of the complexities with it explain that reliability, etc. Overall it’s just plain wasteful to be spending any of that on perfectly working motors.
So I instead went a much simpler approach. I have wired optical relays directly to the remote control, wired those to a Z-UNO I’m using for a variety of projects, programmed code that can control them, and exposed that to Z-Wave as a blind controller. I went a bit further and wrote code that calibrates the travel and can move them from any specific position to another.
The end result is I can not only open and close them, but I can even say “Hey Siri set blinds to 50%” for example and regardless where they are they’ll move to that position.
Once I integrate a few feeds from my security system the next step will be to set a few scenes to automatically open and close them when we leave/arrive home.