clever trick to let HS know window blinds open/shut status

[Jinster]

I have an x10 blind motor setup, with an appliance module intercepting the motor for the blind. The motor is the typical one, seen here

For those who are not familiar with this, x10 controls power on/off to the motor, the motor then spins to close or open the blind. The motor doesn't know or feedback on the position of the blind, so there is nothing built-in to notify Homeseer/x10 whether the blind is fully open, fully closed or partially open. The motor stops spinning when a preset position is reached in either direction, and automatically operates in the reverse direction when next activated, until reaching the end of the other preset direction, then it reverses again.

When the motor reaches the preset end position, it just stops, even though power is still supplied. So on next operation, you need to first turn off the appliance module supplying the power, and then turn it back on again to get the motor going in the opposite direction. This off first then on business is easy to solve with a macro.

The problem is: without looking, is there a clever way for Homeseer to know whether the blind is in the open position or the closed position?

The scenario is like this: I press the "sleep" button on my Android/iPhone HSTouch interface, all lights shut, music stops, and the blinds go down. But if HS doesn't know the position of the blinds, then if the blinds are already down when I press "sleep", the blinds would actually open, which is obviously not what I want.

[Person]

If you only control blinds using home seer you can use virtual device that tracks state of the blinds. Every time you turn on the switch you reverse state of the virtual device as well. I have some simple code to do this or you can build two events to do this:

http://board.homeseer.com/showpost.p...8&postcount=17



Really robust solution is to put sensor in. Then build two conditional events, close blind/open blind that run only if blind is open/closed.

[Wadenut]

I use one of these units. Apart from their being quite loud, they work pretty well.
I'd tried using separate scripts to manage this, but they would constantly get out of sync.

Without going into too much detail, this script has served me well with thiese devices. ( You will want to modify this a bit to point to your devices).
From your events, you simply call the "Open", "Close", or "Toggle" routine as required. It does use a virtual device to track the status. Check the "Only allow one instance to run" box for the script run action in your events. This way, the virtual device stays in sync.

[Uncle Michael]

If you want an independent check on the location of the blind, and depending on the configuration of your installation, you may be able to use a DS10. I'm thinking that you could place a DS10 where the blind stacks when it is open so that it is always hidden, and attach a magnet to the blind so that when the blind is fully open the magnet activates the reed switch. If you want to go further, you could try to put another DS10 at the fully closed position, but that might be more difficult to hide and would not add much additional information.