Overall your mesh looks good but you have some high route changes on some of those blinds. Maybe run an individual repair on each blind to force it to find a closer repeater. Also what firmware are you on with those controllers? I think the latest is either 3.12 or 3.13
Yeah that's why I was asking if a soft-reset may help re-route them to more optimal paths. Right now some blinds in the first floor are beaming to switches from the second floor which are on the opposite side of the house.
Firmware is 3.12, using the community driver.
Soft reset won't affect the radio. Do a repair per node and wait a day or two.
Well, the automation worked properly this time after I made the suggested changes to the rules but I tested unplugging and resetting one of the motors that has an issue with the batteries while leaving the other one plugged in. The unplugged did not close or respond to the rule while the plugged one did. This seems like an issue with the battery itself. I'll have to contact iBlinds.
Has anyone had something similar happen? Keep in mind these have solar panels and they've been plugged in for over a day so the battery should not be red.
Glad to hear you are getting closer. I have never seen mine have a battery level of 1, not even when I first got them. Contact them for sure.
So this morning, every single window opened up perfectly fine.
Come this afternoon, only some random windows closed while others stayed open. I tried the automation twice, and then tried manually by clicking close on the device. I had to close them by pressing the physical button.
What's worse is that even after they're fully closed, I get this in my dashboard. It's as if the devices aren't reporting their status properly.
I even switched to the built in driver instead of the community driver with no noticeable difference. There doesn't seem to be a common pattern with a device, each time a random one fails. The only common issue is the battery being faulty.
Thoughts?
I am not an expert.
I was tremendously frustrated with my iBlinds initially. I am happy with them this morning. I am running four iBlinds V3 with firmware 3.12 and the community driver, C8 now but initially C7. Here is some of my experience over the last two years:
-
It seemed that moving all of the blinds at the same time caused problems sometimes. Now, if I want to open them all at 6:30 AM, for example, I time them one minute apart. 6:30, 6:31, 6:32, 6:33. I don't have problems now. Coincidence?
(no pun intended) -
I had problems with my dashboards showing the correct state of the blinds. Those problems went away - possibly due to the C8 or maybe something else. I can also move the blinds to any position using the sliders on the icons.
-
I suspect that they work best with a direct connection to the hub. The C8 may have helped.
-
They seem to "settle down" with time. I don't know if that is a Z-Wave issue or my imagination.
-
Moving the blinds twice a day my batteries last several months. One of my batteries doesn't hold a charge and probably needs to be replaced. They are out of stock at this moment.
-
I used to have a Z-Wave repeater near the blinds but I think that they work better without it.
-
I do not use security.
I was where you are but it got better. I would buy them again.
1 Like
What did the device page show for the blind position/switch/windowshade, before you clicked close? 0/off/Closed or did is show on/open?
Is your automation still pushing out refresh commands as well as position? I would be curious to see if when one of the blinds is not reporting correctly if you click on refresh in the device page if it makes the blind report correctly. My recollection is it doesn't.
I would ignore the 2 blinds with the battery issue and try to troubleshoot 1 of the other blinds first.
@Hal3
I changed all of my blinds to the built in driver yesterday and I also broke out the automation to two main groups: upstairs and downstairs. I then set it up so that they open and close at different times.
This seems to work because all of them opened and closed perfectly today. I need to tinker with a few other rules, but the "main one" which is open all and close all is now working.
If these start to work consistently I'll feel comfortable mapping them over to Alexa which is feeding an Echo Hub.
@CaptWoody
To answer your question, yes they are refreshing in the rule. However, if the device doesn't update its status then the rule gets caught on a loop and repeats itself until it has done so for 15 times or until it makes sure all devices in the group are reported as either closed or open depending on the rule that is running.
In retrospect, I regret having made both changes yesterday because now I can't be sure if the driver had anything to do with the issue or not. I don't feel like "testing" until I get at least a few days or weeks of consistent behavior.
For those with the battery issue, it seems as if those two batteries are bad so I'll contact them about it. As long as they're plugged into the wall, they work as expected assuming they don't stay asleep.
1 Like
Question, after changing drivers, are you clicking configure?
I found that Alexa sometimes prefers "Alexa, set the blinds to 50% rather than "Alexa, open the blinds".
I also had problems with Alexa confusing "blinds" and "lights". I call them "shades" and all is well.
1 Like
I've had iBlinds (five sets) for several years, and the only thing that finally made them perfect in my case was the C8/C8-Pro, w/their external antenna. Just a bridge too far for my particular home/mesh w/the C7's internal Z-Wave antenna to reliably talk to the blinds motors through the thick metal casings on my blinds. I had two blinds (in two different rooms, and one of them was just 15' direct line of site to the hub) that would repeatedly have problems responding, and eventually I would need to do a replace (replace the blind w/itself) and then it would be OK again for months.
Migrated to the C8 (and later to the Pro) and all my Z-wave iBlinds issues were resolved. iBlinds were the only problemmatic Z-Wave devices on the C7, everything else just worked, and they were much closer to the hubs than many of my other Z-Wave devices. In my case I think my particular metal blinds casings were just a bit too Faraday cage-ish. No idea why the particular motors were more sensitive given their different locations/distances to the hub.
Not saying my experience will match yours, always a YMMV situation w/mesh & device issues, and you're getting a lot of good advice here that is worth following.
1 Like
@rlithgow1 - No, I'm not re-configuring once I switch the drivers.
My home is small and I don't think we should be forced to upgrade to the latest hub as a way to handle less than 50 devices overall. Each room has a beaming capable switch so signal strength should not be an issue.
Today was another "good day" lol. The blinds opened well in the morning, closed well in the afternoon and I even tested one out which was giving trouble before and it closed fine when I commanded it to through the Echo hub.
I'm starting to suspect that the driver had something to do with it? (No offense to the community driver)
Or maybe the network just settled down? It's strange that this has the mood swings of a teenager going through puberty.
On another note, the dashboard still thinks some of them are open for whatever reason. I may just adjust the Shades template to have no color indicator when they're open or I'll try to fiddle with the CSS to get it to behave properly.
1 Like
Any time there is a driver change you should click configure on the device page.
On my c7 I ran 200 devices quite comfortably. The hub is likely not the issue. I have 14 iblinds v3's and the only time they fail is if the battery runs out. Charge and everything is fine. I posted earlier I noticed you have a lot of route changes on some of your blinds. I wonder if you'd benefit from some beaming repeaters....
FWIW, they differ mostly in the preferences presented (and the fact that the custom drivers are were around before the built-in driver); the Z-Wave commands used are standard and should be pretty similar in both. I don't see any way the driver should affect things for better or worse.
This seems more likely--or just luck given the varied experiences above. 
I did have a faulty battery in one of my 5 and they sent me a new one. Charges fine now.
I usually have a 3-5 second delay and maybe 10 every so often. Fairly reliable day to day.
These are sleepy end devices like locks so they aren't always listening ASAP.
Yeah, they've been working perfectly the last few days and I have two batteries coming in which they sent. So far, so good!
While I understand the community driver does the same thing as the built in driver, for some reason I can't shake off the feeling that it was causing an issue.
- The blinds showed up differently on Alexa when I use the community driver vs the built in
- The blinds tilted inconsistently when I used the community driver even though I had default settings and the same settings on all blinds. (i.e. if I tilted them manually by 10 or 20 points they'd barely even tilt)
- On the community driver, the devices took longer between commands
- Once I switched all of them to the built in driver, their response rate has improved significantly.
I had driver issues with other devices like my GE switches, where the GE driver caused connectivity problems but the generic hub drivers worked perfectly.
Not ignoring the possibility that it could very well be that the network settled down after having added 10 devices, but I added these in the span of a few days. Is it really that moody?
Anyways, at this point they're working via rules, they're working via echo hub commands and they're working via voice commands via Alexa. This means I'm happy with them thus-far. Eric at iBlinds has been of incredible help.
Let's go one by one, then. 
Without any information about what is happening, it's impossible to say much more. But I can say that the community driver exposes the "Switch" and "Switch Level" capabilities, which will make it appear more like a dimmer (and respond to such commands), beyond just the "Window Shade" capability like the built-in driver. This was once common, as the shades/blinds capabilities were (and to some extent, still are) rarely used, so it increased compatibility with other apps.
Because the community driver code is open, you can comment out these lines if you prefer other behavior.
This has to be chance. Both use the same standard Z-Wave "Switch Multilevel Set" commands.
Not sure what this means, but most of the underlying Z-Wave commands should be the same. The community driver does have built-in S2 Supervision retries (if using S2) that could affect future commands, though likely not by anything noticeable, if such encapsulated commands are not reported back from by the device within the expected time or after so many retries.
I again can't see this being much more than chance -- the Z-Wave commands that it sends, aside from supervision encapsulation on top of some command as mentioned above -- are standardized and more or less the same between the two.
In any case, certainly use whichever driver you prefer. The community drivers pre-date the built-in drivers, and they're also open-source so you can see what they're doing if you want to change anything. Just wanted to clear this much up. 
1 Like
Yeah I'm not disagreeing with you, I'm just stating the facts as they happened.
What I mean with time between commands is how long the blind takes to actually respond to being tilted, closed or open.
And what you expressed on the switch being exposed to Alexa is what I was referring to, the built in just has a position slider while the community has an open/close button plus the slider.
They seem to be working nicely while separated into two groups.
Status Update
So a few days of proper operations and today I had three out of six blinds fail.
Going to try to increase the loop from 15 times to 30 and see if that helps. It is a bit disappointing that these devices are so finicky.
While I appreciate the fact that they open and close automatically, having to walk on eggshells because the device has mood-swings is starting to get annoying really fast.
If they continue to fail occasionally, I'll try to break them up into even smaller groups. I'm trying to avoid creating 20 rules just to manage these.
