Keeping the house cool part 4. Automatically tilting Venetian Blinds with Soma Tilt.

When we bought th house, the huge window in the living room and the dining room windows were covered with 20+ year old roman blinds and whilst they were functional.. they had seen better days. I've already covered their replacements in other posts.

However, in the Kitchen and bathrooms, the windows were covered by Venetian blinds which were all ok. So why replace them? All I wanted was the automation to tilt them.

Fortunately, from Estonia there is "Soma Tilt". I tried for a single window before committing to the rest of the windows. If you want HomeKit support, though, you also have to buy their bridge which is, again, a Raspberry Pi and they use Homebridge inside it. I wish they would just release the code so I could run it on my Homebridge instance. So, yet another bloody bridge!

I actually put my 2nd order in near the beginning of lockdown for Covid, which meant that Soma were having supply difficulties (They manufacture in China). However, this is good for me as they then supplied me with Soma Tilt 2 which is faster, and noisier, than the original Tilt. At the time of writing Tilt 2 is not available from their web site.

To be fair to Soma. You can slow down the motor and so you will get less noise.

The following video shows you the difference in speed.... and noise. I have these two blinds together as an accessory group in HomeKit, so they start operating at the same time. I've turned the speed up on the Soma Tilt 2 to 100% just to maximise the difference.

There's a number of things I really like about these after market tilt mechanisms:

1. It comes with a Solar panel to charge the battery
2. The battery lasts quite a long time if you just charge (I did that to see how long it would last)
3. the actual Soma UI is quite nice, although it talks over Bluetooth, even if you have a Soma Connect (Their bridge)

All I've done with these blinds is add automations around privacy, so they close at night with all the others in the house, and the ones in the Master bathroom also are involved in the automation around keeping the house cool that I introduced in the blog post about Fyrtur blinds. So the automation now looks like: