Curtain widget and curtain moods for home automatisation purposes

Ideas / Suggestions On Cayenne Roadmap
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I’m very excited about the myDevices Cayenne app and forum! :slight_smile:
Nevertheless, the current possibilities within the app are too little extended to be able to switch over my home automatisation on RPi’s. Still I’m very pleased with what has been realised so far.

Through this I want to bring up another idea/suggestion;
As there could be a “light” widget in a future release, I was wondering if a “curtain/screen” widget can also be put on the roadmap?

Backgroud:
At this moment, 9 curtain motor systems (large windows) are implemented at my house. The back side of our house is oriented to the south. In summer time, it’s really necessary to close the curtains in order to keep the temperature under controle in our home.
I want automate this process by using data from a temperature and luminosity sensor, and even when available in the future realtime weather forecast data, to control the curtains.

Specific:
The widget can be presented as two buttons (up & down) with a “favourite” button in the middle. The favourite button can be use to setup the curtain in a favourite height.
In addition, ofcourse it would be great to combine a couple of “curtain” widget’s into one, in order to control the different curtains as one group. For example “all down”.

Needs:
When the up or down button on the widget is pressed, keep an output high for a certain time that can be filled in/choosen (possibility to enter milliseconds, see later).
The time is depending on the speed of the motor and the lenght (height) of the curtain. Once the curtain has passed an upper or a lower limit switch, the motor voltage will drop, even if the voltage is still available on the steering side.
Because feedback from the limit switches is not available, I propose to keep the direction (up or down) highlighted in a certain way. In that prospective, it is possible to check (if you are not home) in which position the curtain is.

In order not damaging the motor when changing from up to down (or vice versa) a waiting time of 500ms is needed to make the transition.
So if the curtain is going up, and the down button is pushed, a time of 500ms is needed with no voltage on one of the direction wires, before putting a voltage on the down direction wire.

Last but not least, in addition to following proposal about “light mood” possibilities;

it would be great to have a same setup but then a “curtain mood” instead.

It’s a lot to read, but I try to give as much information and details as possible to fulfill the needs.

2 Likes
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Hi @FreV,

We’re equally excited to have you in the Cayenne community. Thanks for signing up and sharing this suggestion!

Regarding custom widgets, one feature we have already on the roadmap is the ability to add custom code. I realize that’s not exactly what you’re asking here, though it may be something that proves useful when you implement your project.

I bring that up to make a contrast: what we don’t have in the roadmap right now is custom widgets in terms of being able to define graphics, or combine our base custom widgets into ‘combo’ widgets. For example, two buttons and a slider on the same widget. I think this is how I’ll log your suggestion since I don’t know if we will make a specific curtain widget (though I’ll never say “never” :slight_smile: )

For now, if you create a new project in Cayenne via Add New > Project, you could construct a lot of what you’re asking for from multiple simpler widgets, like taking a slider widget and setting its Min/Max values to the extremes of your curtains, and then making button widgets to ‘quick access’ favorite settings like ‘all down’ or ‘evening reading time’, etc. This is just a suggestion – you could do this with a timer+motor as you’ve suggested too (timer functionality is on the roadmap already, though not live yet). Some of the guys on the community here smarter than me will probably have even better suggestions.

As far as tying scheduled events to an outside calendar, I don’t think there are immediate plans for this. It may be a little hacky (we are all here right now because we like hacking a little, right?), but maybe you could make a python script or similar that can parse your Outlook calendar, set some value that can be read in by Cayenne, which then prompts triggers or scheduled events in our system. Certainly as the platform matures we may venture into integration with major online services like Office 365 / Facebook / Google to drive data points in the system.

1 Like
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Hi @rsiegel.

As I understand from your answer above, it’s not feasible to have a curtain/blind widget as simular to the upgraded light widget mentioned in the link below?

Add More Device Icons - Add Macros - #6 by bestes

On the other hand it would be great to have something simular for blind/curtain control.

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Hi FreV, no, I don’t want to be that pessimistic about it. It’s absolutely feasible, just a matter of our priority in creating such a widget. I’ll add this to our community request list and roadmap, which we’re really set to start tackling in earnest as we finish up our API work.

The best way to get this to happen faster would be more voices behind it, so if anyone else comes across this thread and is looking for a similar control, please post your support here and bump it up our list!

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No worries! :wink: It would be great just to know it’s possible to implement and it’s on the roadmap! I know you guys have a lot of items to prioritize :facepunch:t2:

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That would be great. I have 3 sets of blinds I would like to automate.

1 Like