Slightly off topic, but has anyone here seen this:
Supposedly available in Feb. Half the cost of an iBlind and no installation headaches.
I'm always leaving the blind open in my office, and there's a straight line from the sidewalk on the side of my house through my office window, through the living room, the master bedroom and right into the master bath.
It's already been established that I am incapable of remembering to close the blind or the office door when I'm done working, so a high WAF is all but guaranteed.
If they deliver, and if it actually works. I've been burnt a few times on crowd funded projects, so I haven't pulled the trigger. Yet.
I'm ordering 20...just because of that video. Wizards!!!
Seriously, that looks pretty cool, especially after some of the install issues w/iBlinds that folks have run into.
But - appears to depend on your current blinds having a "hook and wand" mechanism to open/close the blinds. Ours work via two pull strings, so unless they have some sort of adapter kit (didn't see one) they wouldn't be compatible for us, at least on our existing blinds. Anyone see different?
Looks cool, but....cloud API? (And currently none at all?) I'll pass. My favorite thing about iBlinds is that they're Z-Wave, so not locked into any one hub/app. (Yes, "being Z-Wave" isn't exactly high praise.... )
Yeah, wouldn't work for those. I don't think you can even buy those anymore, for safety reasons.
My wife's friend's son's cat got its tail caught in the pull strings a few months ago. Don't remember the details but it wasn't pretty and it cost a few thousand in vet bills. They were in a rented apartment and the building owners ended up paying the vet bill, and changed out all the blinds.
Geez...I had no idea my blinds were so dangerous. Sorry to hear about the cat, I have two dogs and worry obsessively when they have the slightest issue.
It does make me wonder if the maker of our blinds offers a free safety retrofit - I may call them up and make a strangled noise while I'm talking to them.
The cat made it through ok, fortunately. I think it lost most of its tail, but it could have been the other end and ended up suffocating.
We have pets too, and they're more important to me than anything which is why I won't trust my alarm system to anything but a professional-grade system, especially for the smoke alarms. I'd never forgive myself if something happened to them while we were out.
If you can't get a retrofit, cut the cords as high as you can and if there are multiple strings, twist and fasten them together with zip ties or something, Cords on blinds tend to be much longer than they need to be.
Yes, when I used them they had the same effect. I think the "Set Level" option is there to allow you to control the blinds position as if they are a Dimmer switch.
The v3 units are so much nicer than the v2 units: they report state back when changed (in Z-Wave terms, do a "set" and it sends a "report" back when it's done, say, if you changed the level/position). The v2 units don't, so my v2 driver basically polled them (or did a "get," in Z-Wave terms) a specified interval ("travel time" in the driver) afterwards. The v2 units were further problematic in that if you did a "get" (or at least this specific type of "get") while they were moving, they did something odd like went all the way open/close instead of stopping at the desired level, so you had to be careful not to issue one too soon. If you don't care for near-instant reporting--or are calibrating the v2s--the longest possible setting should be the least problematic, FYI.
The v3 driver is much leaner because it doesn't have to worry about this or force the device to talk to the hub (the v2 also didn't report battery unless asked, so I scheduled a daily refresh of that so you had some idea and recently added in a few checks to re-schedule that if it somehow got missed and never rescheduled, which seemed to happen on a couple of my devices). The v3 units also support S2, so I updated my v3 driver to accommodate this, while I left it entirely out of the v2 driver since it doesn't. (The v2 driver file has also been renamed, in case anyone is using the importURL; see my iBlinds driver thread for the links.)
That being said, Hubitat's driver will probably work fine for most v3 users--I just like writing my own so I know exactly what's going on. (And I had some apps that would better with the dimmer-esque setLevel() commands and whatnot that Hubitat's "pure" window shade driver doesn't have.)
Thanks for the great summary. Sounds like iBlinds did some good things, glad to hear it.
Can we assume the 3.1 iBlinds driver takes advantage of the FW\communication improvements? NVM...I saw your comments in your driver thread...man, pretty disappointing that the iBlinds 3.1 driver doesn't take advantage of the status communication improvements in the FW. "Two Different Teams" syndrome... We had that sometimes at my old workplace...FW team develops cool innovation. SW team not informed, or mis-informed/partially informed, or just too buysy doing other stuff and SW isn't updated to take advantage of new FW.
I'm off to look say your driver, thanks for sharing it! Update: LOVE your driver and the updates you've put into it. Will be using it going forward. Thanks again for your contribution(s) to the community. Five stars.
Thanks for the report! I put in a quick fix (making "open" go to 50%) but will think of a better way to do this in the long run, either adding back the v2 preference for "open" level or seeing if the device's Z-Wave parameter for the pushbutton also works for basic "on" commands to the device (it's only documented for the former).
That was about my experience, too. I had a v2 unit in the headrail of the same blinds I put the v3 in, yet the v3 charge adapter had a much harder time fitting (even though they looked nearly identical aside from opaque vs. translucent plastic--though the manual does specifically warn against interchanging the v2 and v3 pieces here). We eventually got it without the use of power tools, but I almost settled for just letting it rest in the headrail without easy access...
I also found the v3 charge adapter cable (the pre-attached micro USB cable) to be about an inch shorter than the one on the v2 unit, which made it harder to reach the motor unit. This had to be repositioned after installation, was not fun, and seems like something they could have easily avoided by keeping the cable the same length, but it is what it is. On the Z-Wave side of things, I'm much happier with how the v3 units operate (aside from some difficulty I had pairing them with S2, which I eventually got to work), so that almost makes up for it.
Wizards!!!
My favorite thing about iBlinds is that they're Z-Wave, so not locked into any one hub/app. (Yes, "being Z-Wave" isn't exactly high praise.... 
)
(And I had some apps that would better with the dimmer-esque 
