Automating motorized shades

Question

I have some non-smart motorized shades that can be raised/lowered with a remote that came with them. I’d like to automate them via Alexa.

Off the top of my head this would require

1. sniffing the signals the remote is sending to the shade.
2. recording/replicating the signal
3. Some kind of hardware to talk to Alexa and transmit the signal when desired.

What steps am I missing, and what would be the best way to approach all this? Would love an off the shelf solution, but it might be fun to custom make something if necessary.

Thanks!

Answer 1

The Shade Store apparently sell at least two different systems. There's Lutron-based stuff, and then there's their own brand. For their own brand there are at least 2 different bridges, don't need if they use the same underlying protocol, though I think so.

The easy option is to just buy the bridge, which can then be operated from your smartphone. The V1 Bridge is supposed to work with Alexa, though there are reports people have had issues with this. Don't know about V2.

If you want to avoid the bridge and do it yourself:

• The manual for the V2 bridge tells us the radio part seems to use 433 MHz.

• This page about talking to bridge (V1 I think) tells us the underlying tech is provided by Dooya.

• This post goes into details of the Dooya 433 MHz RF protocol with all instructions for sniffing and then reproducing the RF signal. It's based on a different brand of blinds so it may be a different motor from Dooya, but the basic principle remains the same (and I would be surprised if the protocols were actually different).