How I automated the Somfy blind with a rain sensor

khengsoon

It is rainy season now in Singapore, and since we are now back in the office, during the heavy rainy day, my home balcony flooring will get wet due to the heavy wind and rain. Then I started to think about how can I automate to bring down the blind during the rainy day.

Although I can simply buy the rain detector from Somfy, still there are a few drawbacks, I don’t have control over the solution, and the hardware itself costs almost SGD100. After some research, I finally DIY the solutions with Home Assistant, Aqara Water Leak Sensor, Bond Bridge, Echo Dot, and a rain detector. Let’s go, I will show you how I built one.

Here are lists of devices I used to make the solution work

  1. Aqara Water Leak Sensor – AliExpress ranging from SGD 17-SGD 19 x 2
  2. Bond Bridge – Bond USD 99
  3. Rain detection module – AliExpress SGD 0.8 per piece x 2
  4. Echo Dot – Carousell or Amazon
  5. Water Proofing Case – AliExpress SGD 0.4 per case x 2
  6. Hot Glue Gun
  7. Soldering Iron

Yes, the total hardware cost added up exceeded the price of the rain sensor from Somfy, but the reason why I still go with DIY is I have total control, and customizable. Besides, the Bond bridge can automate my living room’s ceiling fan, so I think is a good deal.

Let’s Get Started

Start with pairing the Aqara Water Leak Sensor with the Aqara Hub or Zigbee2MQTT. I paired 1 with Aqara Hub and 1 with Zigbee2Mqtt, and both work great.

Aqara Hub M2 exposed itself to Home Assistant through HomeKit, and you may notice if the sensor is paired with Zigbee2MQTT, extra entities are exposed to Home Assistant

Paired with Aqara Hub M2
Paired with Zigbee2MQTT

Next, we need some soldering work

I start with soldering the red and black wire to the rain detector, order can be any

Next, I connect another end of the red/black cable to the Aqara Water Leak Sensor, order can be any

Store the Aqara Water Leak Sensor inside the water-proofing case
This is very important, the connector part need to covered up with glue.

If the connector part is left exposed, water retention can easily happen and it will keep sending the “wet” signal to the Home Assistant, and I need to use a blower to dry the water after rain.

Stick some blue tack below the casing to make the case stick on the floor
This is the final product and placing

Next, you need to pair the Somfy blind remote with the Bond bridge, you can follow this simple Video guide

Follow this instruction to add the Bond Bridge in the Home Assistant. You can see the below tab in your Home Assistant once done
Settings-> Devices & Services

Try pressing the up/down/stop button and make sure the blind works according to the command you press.

Create an Automation Scene

Select “device” for the automation trigger, then select the water leak sensor you wish to trigger, follow by the trigger. In my scene, I selected “… – Aqara become moist”
Leave the condition empty, because it does not matter. Next, set the blind to close, followed by sending out a push notification, and make announcements through Echo Dot.
I will check if now we are sleeping, if yes, do nothing
If we are still awake, I will check if all Ziptrak blinds are closed, if not all blinds are closed, I will make announcements through Echo Dot, “Is raining, bring down the blind”. If all 3 blinds are closed, no point make the announcements, is very annoying.

For the announcement, I and my wife prefer Alexa voice, Alexa sounds natural compared with Google and the TTS with Sonos.

And here is the final result.
Besides, by bringing down the blind when raining, I create a scene to open the blind for the house to get some sunlight after the rain sensor dries for 30 minutes.

So that’s it for this sharing. Hope you can get some ideas from here. Thanks for reading

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