Looking at replacing some blinds with shades.
The material from a ‘Window covering’ place is usually cost prohibitive for me.
My windows are 120" tall and anywhere from 50-70" wide.
I had priced out the fabric before and it would be $700+ for each window for the fabric alone. OUCH.
Well bright idea. Project screens. Got a sample pack of some from Amazon.
Basically the same material, hell its made to do the same damn thing. Block light out and be rolled up…
Now on to the actual zwave part. I was looking at the Rollertrol motors.
I see they operate on radio frequency (so not native zwave).
They have a zwave bridge to control their radio frequency. ZWAVE Motor Control For Window Shades & Blinds
However they run on battery and I can hook up a solar panel (mine or theirs) so it operates without any wiring FOREVER!
I was curious though as to the real life control I will have over the shades. I would think all the way up and all the way down is easy enough. I am curious though how reliable going half up and half down would really be. It seems to just be configurable for button presses no actual feedback to where the motor really is. So the challenge is knowing the current state and then getting to the desired state. In addition how does it show up in vera? Will I know where my shades are? Does it work with the Authomation app?
Have two blinds controlled by rollertrol. Using the rfxcom plugin I can either open or close the blinds, no in between. Have not tried the controller unit that you have referenced in your post. The one referenced shows screen shots under UI7 with a slider for in between settings so looks like it supports incremental stops. Best to check with rollertrol
I have 5 rollertrol window openers and 11 roller blinds of up to 1200mm wide and 3m high, all cabled in wall (it was a new house build) back to a central comms cupboard to a gel battery on trickle feed. Controlled by Vera via RFXcom, the setup has been reliable and convenient for us with the only issues being more to do with Vera than Rollertrol.
I don’t believe you can set Vera to open or close to a set target point, but with something like PLEG you can initiate movement (i.e. send open or close command) and stop it after a set delay, e.g. 5 seconds. Adjust the delay to achieve the partial setting you want. Not perfect as a solution, but I have used this method to partially open the windows based on inside temperature.
If you want to cut your own fabric, Z-Wave motors offers complete custom length motorized tube with a native Z-Wave tubular motor showing positioning and reporting to 1% via built-in electronic encoder
contact: info@zwavemotors .com
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