Smarter Home 2022: Blinds and Shades

blinds shades

The summer months offer a lot of natural light, but letting in the light comes with heat tradeoffs. There are ways you can automate blinds and shades to give you the natural light you need, when you need it, without having to touch your window dressings.

After working from home during the pandemic for a year and a half, I decided to upgrade my office blinds. The existing blinds where cellular shades that came with us in the move to this current house. They were fine, but I wanted something powered and better looking. Since I was looking at powered shades, I figured why not just get “smart” blinds too. The smart blind market is a premium one and I was immediately turned off when it starting getting pricing. Luckily Ikea exists to give us affordable options in the home decor space. I settled on the Fyrtur motorized roller shades in gray. Because of the size of my office window, I needed their largest offering of 122x195cm (48×76 3/4″). They fit the width perfectly, but are way too long, so I deal.

Ikea’s smart system links to their Tradfri hub to communicate with any of the major smart home ecosystems. When I purchased the blinds, the Tradfri Gateway was out of stock everywhere. As of this writing, Ikea has announced a new version coming in Fall of 2022. Obviously I bought the shades anyway thinking to myself “I bet I can get this working without the Ikea gateway”.

In a short amount of time I received the roller shades from Ikea and installed them above my office window. They have a very utilitarian aesthetic but do a great job of blocking the light. Black out shades were not something I needed, but it does work well. The motorized rolling shade was nice and the simple interface allowed me to set a lower limit so I could one-touch close them and not have them extend all the way to the floor. They came with a little handy remote that can open/close the shades without having to touch the large crossbar at the top. Funny thing about the remote is that the included wireless transceiver needs plugged into power for the remote to work. After searching again for the Ikea smart home gateway, I started the journey of making these dumb blinds smarter.

After some Reddit research I learned more about the Fyrtur blinds and that they communicate over the Zigbee wireless standard. This was great because I have a few Zigbee hubs in my house. First, my recent Aqara camera purchase has a Zigbee hub built in. A quick web search lets me know that the Aqara Zigbee hub is a closed system and only works with Aqara Zigbee accessories. Next, I went to my eero 6 pro wireless mesh system which also has Zigbee built-in. The eero Zigbee implementation is piggybacked on Amazon which means you can only add Zigbee items that work with Amazon/Alexa. The Ikea system does not work with Amazon. Lastly, I looked at some other ways I could get this connected by using a Homebridge plugin, my LG TV’s hub, or even “hacking” the smart system in the Ikea shades. No dice on either of those, so back to Reddit to get more answers. After posting about my predicament, someone recommended to me an open Zigbee hub that I can plug into my Homebridge Raspberry Pi via USB.

The USB Zigbee gateway that I purchased was the Conbee II. This is a pretty interesting project and the configuration is a little tricky. I made a walkthrough on how to get this working over here.

motorized shades gif
Motorized shades closing

My office shades were now connected to the Zigbee hub and I connected that to a Homebridge plugin which added the shades to Apple Home. Now that they were in my preferred smart home ecosystem, I could do some automations. When I start working at home, I have an automation that runs from my Stream Deck to start my day. I added opening my office blinds 35% to that script. Also, my ‘Good Night’ scene closes the blinds. As we get into the cooler weather with less light, I will add some more automations to close them with the setting sun.

Check out my other Smarter Home posts!

Adding Ikea Frytur shades to Apple Home

This is a quick tutorial on how I added Ikea’s Frytur smart shades to Apple Home (p.k.a Apple HomeKit) using Homebridge.

These are the items I used to make this work:

Having a working Homebridge implementation was very helpful as I didn’t have to setup another device and could just focus on getting the shades to work.

  1. Install and setup the Ikea Frytur shades
  2. Pair the remote with the shades and make sure they work
  3. Plug in the ConBee II to the Raspberry Pi via USB
  4. Install deCONZ software on the Raspberry Pi
    1. Connect to Raspberry Pi over SSH
    2. Set user USB access rights
      sudo gpasswd -a $USER dialout
    3. Import Phoscon public key
      wget -O - http://phoscon.de/apt/deconz.pub.key | sudo apt-key add -
    4. Configure APT repo for deCONZ
      sudo sh -c "echo 'deb http://phoscon.de/apt/deconz $(lsb_release -cs) main' > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/deconz.list"
    5. Update APT package list
      sudo apt update
    6. Install deCONZ
      sudo apt install deconz
    7. Reboot
      sudo restart -r now
  5. Once the Raspberry Pi is back online, connect to it via VNC
  6. Menu > Programming > deCONZ
  7. Go to the IP address of your Raspberry Pi from a web browser to access the Phoscon web app, the default port is 80
    http://<your-ip-here>/
  8. Follow the Phoscon setup instructions until you are able to access the ConBee II gateway
  9. Go to Devices > Lights under the hamburger menu
  10. Click on Add new lights
  11. On your Ikea shades, quickly press both front button simultaneously to put them in pairing mode
  12. After a few moments they will show up and be recognized in the Phoscon web app
  13. Login to Homebridge and click on Plugins and search for “Hue”
  14. Install the plugin named Homebridge Hue
  15. Configure the plugin with a name and address of the ConBee II, use localhost if your ConBee is plugged into your Homebridge device
  16. Restart Homebridge and your blinds will show up in Apple Home