[RELEASE] Somfy ZRTSI II

There is a community app that sits between Simple Automations and Rule Machine in terms of complexity of automations it supports...it's sort of like Simple Automations on steroids. In some cases it can be faster/easier to use EE to automate actions that Simple Automations can't handle and don't really require the power that RM provides. You should check it out at some point, you might find it useful, and it is easier to edit/modify automations in EE than RM.

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Yea, but this was just a single-action rule, no conditionals, no waits or delays. Simple Automation can’t handle it because it can’t do an Actuator command. The problem was the complexity of RM UI to a newcomer, not rule complexity.

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Exactly why EE is such a good option (in some cases). :wink: Good to know about options. :slight_smile:

Thanks for this great driver. It works like a charm on my 12 blinds.

One thing I can't figure out is how to move the blinds to a certain position using the "Set Position" command. I did set the "Travel Duration", but no matter what value I put into the setPosition, the blinds go all the way. The "Current State" does reflect whatever I put into the setPosition. What am I missing here?

Wow. Instructions were simple and driver worked perfectly. Thanks!

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Glad it’s mostly working out!

So if your blinds don’t support setting an explicit position (most Somfy motors don’t) then the ZRTSI and this driver have no way to make it work.

The travel duration is for the timing of the closed-opening-open states. These are best guesses since the ZRTSI is a one-way communication device. That is why if you use the remote that came with your blinds the open/closed state in Hubitat will become out of sync.

I understand. Couldn't the driver use the "Travel Duration" to send "Stop" at the appropriate time?

Let's assume the blinds are fully closed (currentPos=0)
Travel Time = 20 seconds
setPosition = 25%
Send stop after 5 seconds

I realize that would result in only an approximation, but it would be better than being able to only open/close the blinds all the way.

I've seen other drivers (not necessarily Somfy ones) do this, but it's not something I plan to add.

I'm not sure that it would work very well. In my experience there isn't a consistent amount of time between when a command is issued in Hubitat and the motor reacts. Sometimes it's fast sometimes it's slow. It would be difficult to get this right.

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Totally understand. Thanks for the explanation.

Thanks for this driver. So far, so good!

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Everything installed fine and operational but appears the open and close commands are reversed when using with my sunsetter awnings.

Any easy update?

I just pushed up an update that adds an option to reverse the on/off direction.

Note: this only applies to on/off. I am not doing any logic for numeric levels, so if your motor supports setting an explicit level/position the numbers are not reversed.

FYI your motor may be set up incorrectly as far as what on/off should do, but this seems to be a common occurrence.

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Worked like a charm. Thx.

I have had this working well for almost a year now, both directly and through Alexa. The one thing I have not figured out which would be nice to have is how to add it to a hubitat dashboard. Is there a dashboard template which will properly control opening and closing my awning?

I have 3 sets of blinds installed (zones 1-3 on ZRTSI II) and I can control all of the on the device pages within Hubitat. I have also added each of the blinds to a dashboard using the Switch template on the dashboard. 2 of the 3 blinds work just fine. The third one which happens to be Zone 1 on the ZRTSI II shows up as Unknown. Has anyone seen this before? Is there anything I can look at to troubleshoot this?

@chris20 I don't use Hubitat's dashboards, but I've seen mention of a "shade" template.

Great work on this Driver.

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Anyone ever looked in to creating a concept of .. not sure the right term, perhaps "sub-channels" .. within this driver?

I have a number of channels that trigger multiple blinds simultaneously. For example, in my environment channel 15 is "all blinds", channel 8 is "all great room blinds", and channels 5-7 are "great room blinds left(5)/middle(6)/right(7)".

For most automations I use channel 15/all blinds. In my experience using a single channel is quicker/more reliable/more synchronized. However, the negative of this approach is that the driver is unaware of the fact that activity on channel 15 means that channels 5, 6, and 7's positions should be changed as well.

I was thinking about digging in to a way to get these in sync with one another. A good parallel to this might be the CoCoHue driver -- it has a concept of groups and individual bulbs, and it keeps them in sync with one another. That's effectively what I'm interested in doing here.

I don't want to reinvent the wheel, so figured I'd float this to the community to see if anyone has ever put any thought in to this previously.

The problem is that the Somfy RTS interface is write only - there is no way to reliably know the motor position. Even if you invest a great amount of energy and develop the most brilliant driver ever written, all someone (your spouse) has to do is to use one of the (Decoflex, etc.) wall switches to position the drapes/blinds, and the assumed/maintained state in the driver becomes wrong.

It’s a poorly designed interface.

I think this could be easily accomplished with a companion app (devices cannot subscribe to other devices so you need an app to handle the syncing). The app would subscribe to the "group" device (e.g. CH15) and would then reflect that state to the child devices.

If a child device were to change independently, then the group device would be out of sync. The app could also listen to changes from the child devices and then set its state to "unknown," although I'm not sure yet if I could avoid an infinite loop.

I'll see if can come up with something. No promises on a timeline. I'm actually having more shades installed this week (I only have one at the moment), so this is something that could be useful for myself and I can test with real devices.

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