DIY Motorized Blinds

Integrations
1

Hello all, and I am glad to join the community. I found Bond and was immediately interested and had a chat with Sophia on the customer support live chat and I was very impressed with the upfront information (even if it wasnt what I wanted to hear).
Basically I want to share my string of how to get my RF controlled blinds to be controlled by my Google Home. I havent actually purchased a Bond Bridge yet, but I might in the future, hoping this would work. So here goes!
To preface, click HERE to view the RF controller I have as my Motor control, simple click of “Up” or “Down” button starts a continuous motion until the “stop” button has been pressed. So hopefully Bond Bridge will be able to connect to this 433 MHz RF remote.
I would tell Google Home, “Ok Google, Open the Living Room Blinds”
Google Home would trigger the Bond Home app to send the “Up” command via RF to the controller.
But because my setup does not stop automatically, I need to set up a stop command as well. Making things a bit more complicated.
So when I tell Google Home, “Ok Google, Open the Living Room Blinds” it would also trigger a IFTTT Webhooks function running a Delayed API found here
Then when IFTTT recieves that delayed message, trigger SmartThings to Tell the Bond Home to send the Stop/Off RF signal to the motor control.

What do you guys think? Any flaws or recommendations?
Again this is entirely dependent on IF I can get the Bond Bridge to connect and transmit the RF remote for the controller.

2

Hey Bradley, the RF part should work fine, but we do not support IFTTT with the V2 system. Plus, latencies on IFTTT were not reasonable enough for the application you describe anyways.

I imagine you could do what you are describing with some local control system like Hubitat, HomeSeer, Home Assistant, etc… There is not a way just within the Bond platform to transmit a second signal after a delay. A second call would need to be made to the API.

Another possibility is, if you used a different motor controller that was momentary—that is, where the motor runs only so long as you hold down the button—you could tweak the “reps” on the Bond API for the up/down buttons to have them run long enough to fully open or close the blinds. I’m assuming here that the motor deadheading for a short while will not break it.

3

There are too many components in play, and anytime the internet is involved it gets worse. There is no way to guarantee accurate timing of the stop command. If you never tell it to stop, what happens? What I would recommend is a bit of a different approach, But this would require a smart hub so that you can add a timer to the up or down to auto stop after a predetermined delay. In this way, you eliminate the internet and improve your chances for a timely response.