Blinds Manager

This is a simple script to help manage blinds controlled by my homie_blind_control firmware.

This provides integration with Home Assistant using MQTT discovery.

When configured and running it will notify Home Assistant via MQTT about the configured devices, and allow controlling of your blinds via HA (open, close etc).

Configuration

The configuration is done via JSON, in a file called config.json in the same directory as the blindmanager script. There is an example configuration that can be used as a template called config.json-example.

There are 2 top level keys, host and blinds. host is just the host name of the MQTT server to connect to to listen for messages and send updates.

blinds in a list object, which each element defining a blind. Each blind has the following fields:

• name: The name of the blind to show in Home Assistant
• channel: (optional), the channel of the blind on the remote, defaults to 1
• remote_id: The HEX ID of the remote, if already paired, use the receiver function of the homie_blind_control to see what this is by subscribing to MQTT events (or in the Web UI for new Remote IDs), if there is no physical remote, this can be any 4 digit hex number
• time_open: The time it would take for the blind to open (in seconds), used to give a rough position to HA and allow setting of position (this is never going to be super accurate)
• time_close: As above for closing time, often different as gravity is helping
• topic: The topic to use when talking to HA, this must be unique
• homie_id: The topic given to the homie_blind_control device when initially configured
• device_class: The HA Device Class for this cover, defaults to shade

Running

Once a valid config.json has been created, run the script. If not running in Docker, it will require Python 3.7 and the PAHO MQTT module to be installed. The included Dockerfile shows how I build and run the script.

When it loads for the first time, all required homeassistant/* topics will be published for HA to discover the blinds. Communication on the HA side is done with a MQTT topic base of blinds/*. It will also subscribe to the relevant homie/* topics to know the status of the blinds, and to publish events to.