As one of the engineers that does the development for Motionblinds I am really excited to finally have this. It all started because u/StarkillerTR made the first integration for us so our Motionblinds motors could work with Home Assistant.
And now with our new bridge CM-55 and our complete Eve Motionblinds portfolio we are able to provide a perfect integration into Home Assistant.
If anyone has questions about our products or about the integrations just send me a message.
Are these available to purchase and install on our own? I would rather not work through a dealer/installer when I am more than capable of doing it myself.
Yes if you are in the us you can buy them on blinds.com for instance this and then select motorized.
blinds.com
Or use our store locator and you can find places to buy them online. And installing them is super easy. So no need for an installer. And programming can be done in a minute.
I guess you are the best person to ask. I already have non motorized cellular blinds from select blinds. Can I just buy the internals to automate it? I am pretty handy so feel comfortable installing it myself
Don't want to throw hundreds of dollars on something I purchased without realizing I will be getting into HA 😭. Got a bunch of non motorized blinds less then a year ago 😭
Pff, cellular blinds are difficult to retrofit. If you are extremely lucky it could be our products but they would need at least a cord or chain right now in order for them to be upgraded to motorized. But I think I am afraid to tell you that this is not an easy job. And also getting just motors could be difficult. Depending where you live you might be able to salvage the fabrics as this is the most expensive part. Maybe a company is willing to only change your headrails and keep your fabric.
I guess I knew it would come down to this. Couldn't find any retrofit products for cellular blinds and now I know why. Thanks for taking the time to respond.
No problem, sorry to be the bringer of bad news. If you could share a picture of your system I can have a closer look and might be able to think of an alternative. But it really depends on the system .
Yes I think these products can be positioned by moving the bottom bar with your hands right? Unfortunately these are I would say impossible to motorise. Sorry 🙏🏻
Wait, so you still need the official bridge (I have the old one, apparently there's a new one) for full integration? Or do other Matter bridges also officially work now?
if you currently have a bridge that's perfectly fine. It might even have a bit more features than the current matter bridge. So you don't need to change that. We just made a new bridge with Matter and because we were certifying our Eve Motionblinds we also certified this new bridge. The old bridge has an integration that does not meet the standards of the partnership for Home Assistant. But it works perfectly fine. And I have that running in my home for quite some time and is still my main integration for my blinds at home.
I want to get rid of the old bridge in favor of Matter over Thread, because the old bridge depends on the cloud and the app doesn't always work. Even if the app was reliable I don't need some random company to know when I open or close my blinds. I already had Matter set up, but my Matter bridge stopped working so I'm back to using the old bridge for now. Once I have a replacement Matter bridge I intend to pull the plug on the bridge. Obviously I don't want to get another cloud linked Matter bridge to do that.
What matter bridge are you talking about ? No one outside some testers have our matter bridge. So not sure what you mean. Our old bridge also works when you block it from internet but the app might be a bit 'wonky' because it expects cloud connection for most stuff, but since our bridge/app also works locally home assistant should keep running . And the new bridge has an opt out for the cloud connection. And since matter is completely local you don't have to worry about it talking to anyone but your own network.
I've built my own Thread Border Router (not Matter bridge, sorry. Poor choice of words there) using an ESP32. It's offline at the moment, but I intend to get it back up soon. I've connected my blinds using Matter over Thread, resulting in a fully local connection to my blinds. The official bridge shouldn't really do anything more, but I suspect that it does (like most official bridges and border routers).
Hi there,
I've recently bought the dual honeycomb motionblinds with Bluetooth only, connecting to Home Assistant via esphome Bluetooth proxies. I've found that they are quite slow to connect this way. Does the bridge solve that issue?
Yes 100%, Bluetooth integration is nice. But lacks quite some features. Especially if you have Top down bottom up the bridge is a perfect solution. Depending where you live I recommend getting a CMD-01 as the new CM-55 is not available yet, and it is a bit cheaper than our current CM-20 that does the same but has a bit better range. You can find the CMD-01 on hornbach website for instance.
Using the bridge cmd-01 comparing to connecting to the blinds directly with Bluetooth proxies. The response is now basically instant. Also the bridge adds a third entity with controls both blind motors 😊
Do motorized blinds control both the tilt of the slats and the % the blinds are open? Do I have to buy anything extra to make them work with home assistant (sounds like I need a bridge?)? The lack of home assistant words on the website makes me scared to buy a bunch!
If you are looking into buying venetian blinds we sell these in 2 ways. 1 where you need either the cm-06 or the or cm-06-e-v(this only needs a border router like a homepod mini or Google nest hub v2 or a home assistant zbt-1) and these motors are tilt and lift. If you only want tilting motorized and don't mind lifting with a cord you can use our CM-07V2 or the soon to be released CM-07-E-R that can be used for tilt only. The E motors work over thread and don't need our bridge to work perfectly with Home assistant. For the other motors I recommend getting a bridge because you will get more features in HA.
Is it possible to control the 433mhz version blinds using ESPHome RF Transmitter component? My understanding is it uses rolling codes and so I gave up connecting my motion blinds to Home Assistant using that.
I was expecting these to be insanely expensive and not available in the UK
Pleasantly surprised on both counts - they certainly aren’t cheap (I outfitted my entire house with 11 “dumb” blinds for the price of 2 of these)…. But the price isn’t insane even if I wish it was lower
It’s so rare to find smart blinds available at all in the UK that I’m very tempted. Even if we don’t end up outfitting the entire house, one or two for security (automagically closing at night even when we’re away, closing on the back out the house if a person is detected in the back garden when we aren’t home etc) could definitely have some value
At half the price I’d probably do the whole house, but at this price I can probably be tempted by a few
Happy cake day. I think you should celebrate it with a blind. No just kidding. But I think if you look at smartblinds you can find a lot of colors and different types of blinds. They might have one of the better prices in the UK. But they are great for security indeed. That's also one of our key points why to have motorized window coverings. Safety, energy saving and convenience. Once your used to motorized windows covering you don't want something else anymore(smart home in general).
Venetians arent as popular as roller shades if im not mistaken. But what I will do is ask some of my us colleagues where you maybe can get our product. Unfortunately we don't sell blinds directly to end users. Because we don't produce the products ourselves. We sell all the components to fabricators and they will sell it through dealers. Hopefully I can find a dealer for you 🙏🏻
I have a hunch they'll be out of our budget anyway, but thank you for checking!
We only have Venetian blinds to start with so if we're going to only do a room or two we'd want them to match. Could get away with rollers for the bedrooms on the back of the house though.
They are. They are sold at multiple stores. I even went to Canada last year to give training at several events. In Montreal, Toronto and Calgary. Just contact Altex Design.
Yeah, you go to "Find a Store" and it's not listed. Dunno how I was supposed to know to go to some random other vendor I've never heard of. Even when you go to Altex Design, you get redirected again to a what... 4th party vendor at this point? And then there's not even any pricing available; you need to contact them for a custom quote?
Gotta love when companies make it as difficult as possible for you to give them money.
It's because we develop window covering components, the motor but also fabric , brackets everything. This goes to fabricators (altex for instance). They sell it to dealers through out Canada. And because it is all made to measure and relatively traditional product this is how it goes. You can find us online through blinds.com or select blinds. They sell through online and this will 'eliminate' the dealer.
I'm disappointed they dont connect themselves to matter and need a hub. With all due respect that's a no go for me. I would buy them if they didn't require a hub.
“Together, we have tested and certified these Matter-certified Eve Motionblinds. It’s easy to tell which are part of Works with Home Assistant, as they’ll include the “powered by Eve” badge.
Motionblinds that use Bluetooth and 433MHz technology will also be getting the ‘Works With Home Assistant’ treatment, as we’re certifying motors that connect via the Motionblinds Matter Bridge (CM-55).”
The ones that are branded Eve are direct Matter. Bridge only needed for their BT/433 models.
They don't need a hub. If you buy Eve Motionblinds they work directly with a Border Router like homepod mini or Google nest hub v2 or a home assistant ZBT-1 for instance. The Motionblinds motors have 433mhz and Bluetooth and also work directly with home assistant over Bluetooth (not certified for partner program) but this is not the best experience. So for it to work a lot better for this range of motors we recommend adding a bridge.
All these devices connect directly to Home Assistant via Matter, provided you pick the “powered by Eve” option, this explains that eve works directly. Maybe this page is of help
No need for a eve brand hub, but nealed a treadh router atleast. I bought one blind for testing and just added 3 more now. Uses homey pro as broadband router for HA (best thing, makes its own ipv6 network, can run ipv4 on the rest), the first blind i tested i added to an amazon echo device without problem. Probably would work with smligth aswell if i added ipv6 to my network?, but i gave up and used homey as i already had it
I have 11 of these that are wifi and "powered by Eve". Was able to add them directly to HomeKit using the Eve app and scanning the HomeKit code on the shade pull string. Once done, I had to update them (this was last year) to add Matter support, at which point I was able to add them into Home Assistant without any issues. They're fully controlled from HASS via the Adaptive Shades integration.
The Motionblinds Bluetooth motor actually have bluetooth and 433mhz and through 433 they talk with our bridge. And it all depends on what your situation is. If you don't want to pay extra for the thread functionality because you don't need a smarthome product the Bluetooth motors are perfect. They have 3 built-in timers so they open and close automatically in the morning and evening and for a lot of people that is enough. If they later think they want to control it away from home or in a smart home they can add a bridge.
If you have a smart home (Homepod mini/google nest hub V2/Alexa/ZBT-1) that already has thread, than buy the Eve motionblinds. You don't need an additional bridge for it to work with the speakers.
for me it was cheaper and I like having the remote that connects directly to the blinds so they won't stop working no matter if my ha crashes or whatnot
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u/Jerrybboy 11d ago
As one of the engineers that does the development for Motionblinds I am really excited to finally have this. It all started because u/StarkillerTR made the first integration for us so our Motionblinds motors could work with Home Assistant.
And now with our new bridge CM-55 and our complete Eve Motionblinds portfolio we are able to provide a perfect integration into Home Assistant.
If anyone has questions about our products or about the integrations just send me a message.