Motorised blinds and BeoLink Gateway

Hi all

I am after dome advice on the best motorised roller blinds that I can control with the BeoLink Gateway. I have been looking at the QMotion blinds as there is already a driver in the gateway but they are quite expensive. I quite like the Somfy blinds and they are a lot cheaper but from what I have read are not quite as straightforward to control with the gateway. I would be very interested to find out what motorised blinds other members of this forum use and how well they communicate with the gateway.

Any advice appreciated

Huw

Hi Huw,

I have configured Somfy blinds to work with my BLGW and it wasn't the easiest thing to do and I have requested that they consider a driver in the future given that Somfy is a well known brand.

Initially I used the Somfy Tahoma hub to link to the BLGW via IFTTT, but I found this very limited and I was not happy at all with the Tahoma box. In fact, I am trying to sell mine but it is not possible to unlink it from my account and Somfy support just don't reply to requests to help. I would not recommend for the following reasons:

1. Limited control outside of the Somfy App (via IFTTT) - Can only trigger scenes not control individual blinds. 

2. Scenes do not support STOP which means that you cannot half open/close blinds.

3. Slow response time - it could sometimes take up to 5-10 seconds to respond to the button press which resulted in wondering if it has worked or not.

4. Personal taste, I really hate the Somfy Tahoma interface, yes it is simple and if you play around with it can do lots of automation but if you have a BLGW the automation rules should be stored in the BLGW not the Tahoma box.

What I use now is a Raspberry PI running Domoticz Home Automation software (it's free) and a RFXtrx433E USB 433.92 MHz transceiver with antenna which can be programmed to fire RTS commands to the blinds (the setup of this was very easy). I then address the Blinds in Domoticz using HTTP Commands from the BLGW. 

The benefits are:

1. Fast - blinds react as soon as button is pressed

2. Not cloud based therefore will still work if no internet connect which Tahoma/IFTTT will not.

3. Can control individual blinds, including STOP.

The ideal solution would have been for the RFX transmitter to be plugged directly into the BLGW USB port but it didn't seem to work with any commands I tried.

I hope this helps

Steven

Hi Steve

Thanks for the advice. It would be nice if they had a Somfy driver in the BLGW. Considering motorised blinds you would have thought would be a big part in most home automation I would have thought there would have been more than just the QMotion driver on the BLGW. I suppose most people use the Lutron

blinds which I have been considering as I use Lutron for lighting but I use Grafik Eye so I would need to purchase the bridge and I sm not do keen on the look of the Lutron blinds.

I have read a string on this forum regarding using the RTS Transmitter and sending custom strings but I was not sure how easy it is to set up and how do you wire the Transmitter to the BLGW.

I have never used Raspberry PI and I am not sure if I am confident enough in my ability to go down that route. I have taught my self to set up and program the BLGW but not that knowledgeable about computer programming.

Thanks again for the advice Steve and I will look into the Raspberry PI solution.

Huw

Newer Somfy models can sometimes use io homecontrol. BLGW has a driver for the Velux io homecontrol hub. Maybe that can be a way to easily use the Somfy blinds?