[RELEASE] IKEA window roller blinds

You pretty much summed it up. Works well "most" of the time. I do still find they miss quite often. At least once a day my row of blinds has 1 not where it should be. I'm going to change it up a bit when I get some time and set the proper position as a variable and then create a loop on a delay to issue the command until the blind is in the proper position. I'll have to make the delay on the loop at least long enough to allow the blind to go from full closed to open before checking the position.

Ah I was thinking of doing something similar. It is pretty important that the blinds close at Sunset, especially if I'm out of town. Don't want the passersby seeing an empty house while Alexa Guard turns the lights on!

You don't change the driver as blinds are not officially supported by the group and scenes app. On and off do nothing but set level works fine. It is also stateless so only good for sending instructions to the group.

I don't have as many blinds as yourself but strong mesh that do not clash with any neighbouring WiFi channels is crucial. I had similar issues once with my zigbee network missing instructions and found the root cause to be the channel used by my Arlo cameras. I fixed that a long while ago by moving my channel to a cleaner part of the spectrum.

I've got 42 routers in my network and running Zigbee on channel 26. The WiFi AP's in the house are on 1 and 6. I do have one on 11 that's in an outbuilding, and the sideband of 11 does overlap with 26 slightly, but it's far enough away to not interfere with any of the zigbee devices. The mesh is very strong, and all the blinds work fine when controlled individually. The issue is in trying to control them as a group. If I bind a remote to 3 of them, they respond fine as a group. As soon as I add a 4th, they start missing commands. Bringing that out to a row of 9 of them.... it's not even worth trying.

I got a strong Zigbee also and generally never have missed commands to all the lights I have. However, I have noticed some strange things with the blinds. Looking at the logs (I'm using the driver posted above). The attribute reporting is set to send a lot of messages as the blinds move so I think the Zigbee network is getting flooded. Since the hub is sending open/close to each blind as fast as the Zigbee transceiver will allow and as the blinds get the command they start transmitting their position once a couple start it overwhelms the network enough to cause some of the messages to get lost.

I need to play with the attribute reporting sometime.

Try commenting out line 162. This is in there to report the position if the zigbee configuration is being ignored. Commenting out the line should reduce the amount of traffic.

If you really don't want any position reporting then you can also comment out line 195. Perform a full hardware reset of the blinds, then rejoin and try that. There will be no live reporting of the position of the blinds and minimal traffic.

I don't have as many blinds as yourself but I can control all five of mine simultaneously without any issues. I have 257 zigbee devices in my hub.

I've had them on Hubitat, Deconz and now finally settled on zigbee2mqtt. This issue is persistant regardless of platform so I know it's not a driver.

I have very erratic open and close behavior since the 2.2.5.131 update. When I press open the blind will start opening and then randomly stop at a certain point for no reason. This also happens on close.

If I put in a specific level or position the same things happens. It never reaches that position and stops at random numbers. Wondering what changed in the latest FW update and if the driver can be updated to compensate?

Sounds more like a hardware issue than firmware. There's a known issue with lubrication with these blinds over time. Try opening and closing the blinds with the hardware buttons on the unit to see if this still happens. That has nothing to do with hubitat.

Would it happen with all 9 of my ikea blinds all at the same time? They all worked a day ago.

All 9 of my blinds work perfectly if I open/close them from the hardware buttons. Just FYI.

Can you suggest what exactly needs to change in the driver to compensate as I don't see any issues myself. Anyone else see the same?

Sorry. Not trying to be difficult. I have no idea what would need to change.

I'm beginning to think it's a hub FW update issue. I am repairing my blinds 1 by 1 now. The repair does indeed fix the issue. So it seems to be something that changed with my Zigbee mesh during the hub update.

Can you just try to hit the configure button instead rather than rejoin? If only rejoining fixes things then that sounds like a mesh problem. It is possible that there is so much data coming back from the blinds that is hitting a bottleneck somewhere. No idea why the blinds would stop part way enough.

I had a couple of my IKEA repeaters go offline after a hub update. All that was needed was to switch them off and back on. Are you using them too?

I'm not using the ikea repeaters. They didn't seem to make any difference and would stop working all the time. Besides, I have 15 different zigbee on/off switches spread evenly throughout my house so the mesh does seem to be good. All my other Zigbee stuff is working normally. It's just the blinds that are having issues.

I tried using just the configure button. No dice. The only thing that seems to be working is holding in the two hardware buttons and then starting the zigbee pairing process on hubitat. It then recognizes that the blind is a previously paired device and everything goes back to normal.

@a4refillpad - Got my problem sorted. There was a phantom rule machine rule that was supposed to make sure all the blinds were in the down position after 6pm until sunrise. It was disabled, but was still running for some reason. I deleted that rule and everything went back to normal.

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@a4refillpad - I'm creating dashboards for my different rooms and I was wondering if you could add "Partially Open" to the windowShade state when the shade is not at 100% or 0%. This works better with the built in icons for shades in the habitat dashboard.

Also, can you add the switch state to the driver as well so the dashboard changes the tile color of the blind that is open? Right now they just stay gray, but they will change to a color of anything above 0% is "on" and go gray when at 0% is "off".