Somfy Blinds - easiest to control from cbus

Wow - learn from my experience on this....

History of my playing around getting cbus to control my somfy blinds

My first attempt - bought a Universal RTS Interface from a somfy dealer in florida, by the time it landed - it cost nearly $400 (probably cheaper now) - and I eventually got it to work after a week. Getting the cable right was tricky, I needed the RS232 port on my 5500PC interface.. and to program it... well it was not easy - but doable.

Worked for a couple of years, until I decided I no longer needed that 5500PC - there must be a better way...

So then I bought a Somfy Connexoon - sounded great... works with google Voice / Alexa / phone interface / scheduling... That cost around $300 of ebay - cheapest I could find.
Far easier to setup, and its network capable... Worked well with connexoon software - but the API was cloud based, and to try and get cbus talking to it - was an absolute pain. Yes it was probably early days, others might have made it easier... but to be honest I never got cbus working the way I wanted using this device....
I tried homebridge - there are plugins, but they refuse to work I believe for this region - as there are differing somfy cloud servers, and at the time it refused to register anything for me as I was in Australia...

I gave up for awhile - at least I could set up a schedule for opening closing blinds, and use the phone to change something if needed - I could limp by... But the worse thing is the scheduling on connexoon - they limit to something like a dozen schedules. The interface is not as great as the pics make it out to be... but it was the limiting schedule that annoyed me... You use one position to open, one to close, and if you have a different time for weekends - you have used up so many scheduling spots - its not great eh! Very limited and no integration to anything - so no smarts to say if the temperature today was hot, dont open the blind... Very disappointed with this product !

Yes there is doco on the api, but so complex in getting accounts, not intuitive to call - just a pain....

Which brings me to the third optin I have tried... and I love this one.

The cheapest option - Bond Bridge. $149 in Amazon, $5 extra and get it delivered next day. I have had mine for 4 hours and I am just so damn impressed with it.

Their web site does not mention somfy - just blinds, fans, fireplaces - but its basically a IR / RF repeater... Record the remote control, assign it a button, and when you press it on the phone remote - it replays back that code as if it was the original remote....

But to my suprise - it was easy to set up and configure... and just to play with it as a trial... I saw somfy under blinds. It recorded the remote - and it worked first go from the bond. There is scheduling as well and its not limited by number of schedules - each device can have a schedule... much better!

Sure there is a cloud solution, and it integrates to google voice / alexa etc... but their documentation on integration is supurb... Best laid out, easy to understand - and already I am controlling somfy blind by just issuing a http request. Have that associated to a wall switch and its working in under a couple of hours!

I didnt buy this specifically for my somfy controller - but I am going to use it - I bought it to control a ceiling fan... The fan has not arrived yet, but I see no reason why it will not be as simple to have it working through http requests from cbus.

At under half the price of the other solutions I have tried, this is giving me the best results - so I am getting nothing out of this, other than wanting to tell you about a solution I did not know about until a couple of days ago that is going to simplify my house integration.
Sure there are still limitations on this device - I think you can only control 30 items, but at $149 -Id just buy another one.... lol. For a generic device - i only say buttons for on and off - thats limiting - as they are really pushing this for fans, fires, blinds...

I have seen many posts here in the past on RTS / Somfy - so wanted you to know of a far easier one, and a little of my experiences over the last few years - good luck!

 

Sounds like a great solution. I am in the process of purchasing blinds and would like to integrate with C-bus. I have a couple of questions.
1. I am trying to get the blinds people to use Somfy motors but not sure if they can supply them. Given that the Bond appears to be flexible in that it can learn remote codes (providing they are not using the 2.4 GHz channel), any quality blind motor should be fine providing it has a remote? Your solution sounds much simpler to implement than using a C-bus blind relay and hard wiring as the blind installers don't seem keen on integration and would have to set that up separately.

2. I have an unresponsive Wiser 2 that is with Clipsal at the moment. If they can't resurrect it, I will get an SHAC Wiser (or may get one anyway if it helps with integration of the blinds). My son worked as a programmer for a few years before changing fields so could help. He says Lua looks fairly straight forward. Could you please elaborate a little as to how you integrate the Bond into C-bus? Just a brief outline would be helpful.

 

All though not Somfy, I'm using the Shac to control Acmeda battery roller blinds with an Acmeda Automate bridge($250), just had to write a simple lua script for the Shac to talk the Acmeda Automate bridge

 

Thanks for that info, the supplier I am working with can supply Acmeda motors so will look at incorporating a bridge.