Hey Community! I'm getting two sets of roller shades from 3 Day Blinds installed. When I asked about home automation they said they had "a hub" for that. $250 for it "plus installation." The saleswoman didn't know anything more about it and gave me a number at 3 Day Blinds that simply isn't being answered.
The base question here is "Do I need their hub"? There are radio-controlled remotes included in the purchase so I know it's got some kind of signal processing built in. Their hub is "installed" through a phone app, and the instructions are pretty opaque when it comes to protocols and other details.
Your advice is appreciated, especially if you have first-hand experience on this.
Assuming that is correct, you would need their hub and you may possibly be able to bring it into Hubitat using the HomeKit Controller app (for C8 Pro only). The C8 Pro can basically pretend to be a HomeKit home hub, and you can then pair Homekit compatible devices to it similar to pairing a Zigbee device. This should be local control between Hubitat and the 3DB hub, that is how Homekit typically (always?) works.
Or what @chrisbvt said below, and use Home Assistant with their hub. I assume this would be cloud control where HA connects to the 3DB cloud and controls things that way.
Unfortunately, that is a cloud based hub, so there is probably no way to make these shades locally controlled by Hubitat even with the hub.
A cloud driver could potentially be written for direct Hubitat cloud control using the 3 Day cloud APIs, but I don't see that available anywhere.
The good news is they can be added directly to HA with the HA motionBlinds integration. That integration does still need the 3 Day hub involved, unfortunately. The blinds do have to connect to something locally to get to the cloud.
I really like having HA attached to Hubitat to bring in nitch devices that cannot be added directly to Hubitat. It is just a handy option to have available. I don't use HA for anything else, I hardly ever open the HA UI, it just connects devices to Hubitat through the HADB app to bridge them over to be Hubitat devices. I use it totally as a background device connector for Hubitat. So HA stands for Hubitat Assistant for me.
You can just get a used Raspberry PI3 for cheap (PI4 is overkill for HA to just connect a few devices to bridge over), and set up HA on the PI, connect the blinds to HA, and bridge them over to Hubitat. HA is not that bad to set up, you download the PI image from their site, download the Raspberry PI imager app for PC, and put the image on a micro SD card with the imager app. Then put that SD card in the PI and boot it up to HA.
Connect the shades to HA with the motionBlinds integration, after setting up the 3 Day hub. Then install the HADB app on Hubitat, and it will pull in all devices available on HA and make them Hubitat devices that work two ways through the bridge, to update device status and send commands. It will appear that the shades are connected directly to Hubitat using the device bridge, as an actual device for each shade will be created in Hubitat.
A pre-owned PI 3 on Ebay can be as cheap as $20. It something to consider if you are willing to shell out the money for the 3 Day hub.
This makes me wonder if Broadlink Pro or Bond could just learn the RF codes from the remote. It would probably work to send commands to them, but it wouldn't be like a full integration that gets back device status.
HomeKit is probably the best option to connect to Hubitat, if OP has a C8-Pro. The HA bridge method would be a bit more cumbersome to set up.
The 3DB remotes or hub probably do not get a status back either, it is probably fire and forget, and they just assume the action was taken. Maybe the 3DB hub detects the outbound signals from the remote so it knows if you use the remote? Assuming they allow you to keep using the remote along with the hub it would have to do something like that. Or maybe the device fires something back at the hub so it knows the state, which other 3rd party hubs would not pick up on.
I basically have this same situation with my Leviosa blinds. They have their own hub as well, which was also a cloud based unit.. Initially I did buy their hub and used the Alex integration to control them. The hub died about a year after I had it and I had purchased a Bond hub to control a fan. Before buying another of their hub I tried learning the remotes from my blinds. It works great and it's all local control now. As you say you get no feed back from the blinds so you have to assume they did what you want. Mine are pretty reliable and I have never had a issue.
I use virtual blinds and they send the remote commands to the actual blinds through the bond hub. I thought about adding contact sensors to them, but they work 99.9% of the time so I never did.
Yeah, that is a good method to get status back. Before I added a power meter to determine state of my mini split AC unit controlled with Broadlink, I would use two contact sensors on the fin to determine state by position. It is closed when off, full open on fan, and partial open on cool. With two contact sensors in slightly different positions, I could determine what state it was in along with some app logic.
I'm actually still using one contact sensor even with the power meter, as I realized that even when in cool mode, the compressor cycles on and off, and that would cause it to report fan even when in cool mode when it was cycling. So I still need one contact sensor to determine if is is in cool or fan mode since I can't get that just from power consumption.
Just wanted to thank everyone who contributed. I have the 3DB hub on order now and will play with it when it arrives. I expect to reference this thread again then.
