Motorized Blinds

[avpman]

avpman keep us posted as to how the different blinds do in your testing.

iblinds seems to be for retrofitting into existing blinds. Also, they seem to be for shutter type blinds. I am looking at installing cellular blinds.

They are still working great! It's nice not to have to run around the house at night closing up multiple blinds. Also, they all open automatically while I'm having my morning coffee. ☕ If you try them out, be sure to get the optional solar panel to keep the blinds charged. They do have one small quirk though that I hope they fix with firmware. To manually trigger the blind to open or close you have to press the activation button once, and only once, very quickly. Then wait 5 seconds for the blind to initiate it's open or close function. The timing of pressing the button seems overly critical. I don't mind, but telling guests how to operate them manually is a pain. I just give them the Alexa phrase to do it.

[Kevb]

You do need to unpair the remote from the blind, then pair the blind to Homeseer. After that, you can pair the remote to Homeseer. Then associate the remote to the blind, so that you can control the blind with the remote and HS. see page 21: https://member.baliblinds.com/global...l-autoview.pdf

[pcgirl65]

Thanks Kevb . I probably didn't do it in that order. I was messing around with it and got it into homeseer but then the remote wouldn't work. Then I ended up clearing everything and starting over. Well that deleted the device in HS. So then I tried to add it again but it wouldn't go. So then I excluded it from HS but there were problems. Tried adding it again and it seemed to add something but when looking in devices in HS it wasn't there. I decided to give it the day off and try again later. I am interested also in your integration into Alexa. Do you enable voice command on the blind or the controller or both?

[Kevb]

I enabled the Blind "Control" parent device for voice control and checked "Is Light". I did not voice enable the Light child device.
Since I didn't want to say "Turn on the blind, turn off the blind", etc, I made 2 Alexa routines "Open the Blind" which sets the "dimmer" to 100%, and "Close the blind" which sets it to 0%. I can also say "Set the blind to x%" and it will open (or close) partially. It's been working great. I have not used the remote with HS at all, though it is included as a device/ scene controller. You might want to remove the devices from HS and start over, being sure to unpair the remote from the blind as well. Hope this helps.

[pcgirl65]

Thanks Kevb. I finally got the blinds into HS and everything seemed to be working great. Then today I tried to lower the one blind and nothing. The voice command wasn't working and the remote wasn't working. I opened up HS and discovered a question mark on the blind device. Looks like it has disconnected from HS somehow. It is weird that the remote wasn't working either. I had to re-pair the remote to the blind to be able to close it. I tried to Optimize the blind in the zwave section. Said it needed to be woken up, so I did it again and pressed the button on the blind for 3 seconds to make it flash. Still nothing. I am hoping that it will just correct itself at some point. What do you think?

[Kevb]

I'm not sure, I've not had problems, but I only have one blind and it is in the same room as my Z-net. Other than restarting HS4, I don't really have a suggestion, sorry.