Or set to 50% and you will always be right! LOL! Is the shade half empty or half full?
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Has anyone had any troubles getting their ALL their blinds to respond to automations? I have 15 blinds and only about half will trigger on sunrise/sunset as I have them setup. They all executed perfectly on ST.
Yes, but not since I migrated them to my new hub. As part of that migration I used a different channel. Which was much less congested by WiFi signals. That made a huge difference for several devices that would have minor issues from time to time, including my blinds. Now it’s rock solid.
On my old hub the blinds would sometimes not respond or report incorrectly. Since the migration I have not had a single problem.
It might be worth looking into the signal strength and congestion on the Zigbee channel you’re using. Maybe that might help.... But at the same time I don’t have as many blinds as you, and they are really chatty when they are opening and closing. If it’s not the channel, then it could be the chatter. Might also try staggering them so you only close a few at a time. Just a thought.
I've got 9 of them along 1 wall and found that often there'd be a couple that wouldn't respond when executing group commands.
What I ended up doing is putting varying delays between them.
Blind 1 fires right away
Blind 2 fires after a 1s delay
Blind 7 fires after 10s delay
etc..
I thought I'd hate it not having them move together, but it actually creates kind of a cool wave effect that I actually think I like it more this way
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How many zigbee repeaters do you have? What does the zigbee routing table look like? How many total zigbee devices are there? Those all factor in.
I only have 2 blinds, every once in a while one will miss - maybe 1-2 times a month. I have 5 zigbee repeaters spread through the house (Iris smart plugs) I'm giving the repeaters the credit for how stable my zigbee devices are.
I don't have that many, but when I have an issue like that i just make a automation to do something, for just a few bulbs for example, wait 10 seconds, and do the same to the rest .. just an idea if things like that cause issues.
I have only seen issues like that when zigbee channels are close to WiFi ones. Unlike smartthings Hubitat allows us to move the zigbee channel if you have WiFi channels you can't change (neighbours).
Finally had the time to incorporate into the code. Also removed a few little references to smartthings no longer needed.
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So excited to have the blinds paired up! I am having an issue with groups and wondering if anyone might be able to help.
For grouping blinds, I created a group, and then set this driver for the group, and nothing happens. I also tried the default group bulb dimmer 2.1 and nothing responds when I click on or off. What driver should be selected for the group? The shades do show up as dimmers when selecting the components for the group in Hubitat.
Also, when I select these shades for Google Home, after I try to discover devices, it then removes these from the Google Home integration. They worked ok for Alexa without issue. Is there a compatibility issue with Google integration?
Thanks so much for your help!
I could not get groups to work. For me I just choose the two blinds I have and run the actions independently. Works fine since I only have two.
I'm not sure about Google Home, I only use Alexa with it right now. Good Luck!
Thanks for the idea. I set up a Webcore piston to space them out by 1 second and that seems to work well most of the time.
I couldn't get them to show up directly in Google Home. I did get them in by creating a virtual dimmer that google would recognize and set up a rule to mirror the level of the dimmer. The downside was when you say "turn off the lights" the blinds would change.
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.
