Soldering the new one was quite easy in comparison. I managed to peel away the original oscillator with by applying leverage underneath it using a swiss army knife and heating its connectors one by one. Turns out de-soldering things off is much harder than soldering things on. (already had it) a solid copper cable to use as an antennaĪfter 4 weeks, all the eBay items were in place, and I could start soldering.male-male jumper cables - to avoid soldering 😉.10 pieces of the 433.42MHz oscilator - because my soldering is terrible.The PiSomfy hardware guide is excellent in telling you what you need. This means one will need to do some soldering. However, in order for Somfy to make their RTS even more proprietary than it already was, it is not using the typical 433.93MHz frequency but 433.42MHz 🤦‍♂️. Usually for 433MHz signals you could easily use a ready-made module such us this 2CHF sender-receiver pair. Laziness won the day, especially as I wanted to use my spare Pi for something anyway. Turns out there is a full MQTT/web interface script Nickduino/Pi-Somfy that also only goes into the details of how to solder things, and connect things onto a Raspberry Pi. I originally wanted make the blind controller as small as possible and base it on an ESP32, taking that sketch and controlling it via arduino-mqtt. There’s an bare-bones Somfy Remote Arduino sketch that shows how the protocol works. Using 3-4 CHF-worth of hardware components, it is quite easy to build a software radio that will immitate a Somfy Telis remote and control the blinds. Turns out, Nickduino had a similar itch to scratch. Somfy offers a RTS bridge called Somfy MyLink for a wooping ~300CHF, which is a little steep for something that is not necessary and just scratching an itch. The system uses a legacy, proprietary radio protocol called RTS, which only Somfy and Telis use. The system in place is a Somfy’s Telis 4 RTS Pure remote, with two remotes, each being able to program 5 channels (4 individual ones and combined). However, just like with a TV, finding the remote is often tricky, so I decided to try and automate the external blind movements through Home Assistant and further voice commands of Google Home. covers) that are controlled through a dedicated remote of the Somfy brand. We’ve moved to a new apartment and one of its features are external blinds (a.k.a.

In this post I’ll show you how to use a Raspberry Pi and some soldering skills to automate old Somfy blinds via the MQTT protocol exposed to Home Assistant and Google Home.

Somfy remote hack