Smart Awnings done right
I had smartless awnings installed to make them smart the right way.
Smart awnings done wrong
Our south facing rooms get quite hot, so inquired with an installations company about awnings, of which they had three varieties. A hand-cranked system, an electric system with a physical knob, and a smart system with a remote and a hub.
The smart system does not have physical buttons, so if the remote is lost or empty there is no fallback. Besides the remote, it can connect to a special smart hub that connects to the cloud and has an app.
This is of course entirely unacceptable to me. I want to connect it locally to Home Assistant, and I want a physical fallback. So I ordered the electric system with the knob.
Enter the Aqara T2
To make the awnings smart again I got a dual relay Zigbee module from Aqara that has an interlock mode specifically for this type of application, and an adequate current rating for my motors.
On the top you connect power and the motor wires, as well as the wet switching jumper, and on the bottom you connect the original three-way switch.
Then you simply pair it in ZHA and you're good to go. Of course it doesn't provide accurate position control, but you can easily set up some time-based automations and helpers to automatically open and close them.
Together with the Sentinel Core and the Voice PE I can now say "Okay Nabu, open the awnings" and it'll just do it!
Hardware control
It's been working great, but there are some things I would do different in a hypothetical Sanctuary Systems dual relay.
On-device timed switching, so HA can say "turn on for 20 seconds" and then crash and it'll still turn off.
Hardware interlock, it should be physically impossible to short anything, rather than a software setting.
Hardware control of the relays!! There is a noticeable delay between the physical knob and the relay triggering which is unacceptable even for software control.
I've talked about this in the doorbell article, but I want to be able to open and close my awnings if Home Assistant is offline, and even if the microcontroller crashes. Between the switch and the motor should be at most a relay and some transistors.
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