I see a lot of drivers (for Tuya and blinds), but I can’t determine the best driver that might work with the Allesin K130 Blackout Cellular Shades (Amazon). From what I can determine I think that I need an Allesin (Wi-Fi?) Smart Bridge Hub to connect to the Tuya app … to connect to HE.
I can see a driver called Auto Shades by Joel Wetzel (@jwetzel1492), and a lot of Tuya drivers (many by @kkossev) but I can’t determine which of these (if any) would be best for Allesin blinds. I really don’t want to flash firmware.
I could use some help please. Questions:
Do I need the Allesin Wi-Fi Smart Hub to communicate to a Hubitat Elevation v8.0 or can I communicate directly to the blind?
Which driver is likely to best integrate and drive the blinds? An exact driver name would be great but if not …
Should I be looking for a Tuya driver or a blind/shades driver?
What problems could I expect to have if the driver is not designed for the Allesin blinds
Is there a better HE communication Allesin protocol solution that I should be considering?
At a glance it looks like the devices are controlled by either an RF or BLE (BLuetooth) remote. They could probably not connect directly to HE, I see no mention of Zigbee or Z-Wave (or even Wifi).
The Hub they sell, probably talks to them over a local BLE connection and reays that through Wifi to a cloud service.
You would need a specialized driver to work with that bridge/cloud service via TCP/IP.
Your best hope would be if the bridge supported Matter, you could possibly bring that it with the custom Matter Bridge driver.
IF the devices are Tuya based, then possibly you could connect them to some other Tuya Matter bridge, or use the Tuya cloud to bring them in.
Sorry there is no clear cut answer without a lot more digging.
There is probably no easy path to integrate them, if any path.
There is a Tuya cloud driver on this community, the developer has ghosted though and it has limited device support, I am not sure if blinds/shades support was added or not.
It also relies on a "Free Trial" of the Tuya IOT developers cloud, although you can keep extending the trail indefinitely for the time being, they could cut it off at any time.
I only intend to have one of these blinds ... so It can be controlled for Alexa ... but ... you know ... we all want everything controlled from Hubitat