European smart home company Somfy will make its Tahoma gateway hub HomeKit compatible from the beginning of next month, according to the iFun.de tech website.
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The gateway is used to control the France-based company's shutters and blinds, including external blinds, vertical awnings, patio awnings and pergolas, so if the company sticks to its scheduled rollout, owners of these Somfy products will be able to control them via Apple's Home app from December 1.
According to the German tech website, Somfy is delivering the promised HomeKit support around a year late. Compatibility was reportedly planned for a 2019 rollout, but the update had to be postponed several times. Somfy security cameras, on the other hand, have been HomeKit compatible for some time.
As noted by HomeKitNews, the Tahoma gateway is also capable of controlling other areas of the home, including smart lights, gates and garage doors, which is why it's already compatible with Google Home, Amazon Alexa, and IFTTT, in addition to integrations with Sonos, Philips Hue, and Velux.
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Top Rated Comments
For example, I have some velux motorised blinds which are IO compatible. To be clear, these are not part of the Integra Range (Velux's true Smart Blinds) but they are controlled by a wireless remote, which is IO compatible. I have these blinds added to my Tahoma hub, which makes them controllable.
I also have some internal patio blinds which are Somfy, using RTS. Now these blinds are controlled by the Somfy RTS remote, which also can be added to the Tahoma hub.
However, RTS and IO are not equal.
IO is two-way so allows the motor to feed back to the blind whether a command was successful. So for example, "Hey Siri, set the IO Blind to 70%" works.
RTS is one way (point and shoot) so the motor does not feed back. The hub/remote only have three options for RTS: Open, Closed and 'My' (which is a preset height). You can ask Siri to Open or Close the blind. You cannot set a %.
Somfy is bringing out it's own version of IO (called io-homecontrol ('https://www.somfy.co.uk/support/somfy-motor')) which is new hardware motors which will make them function like IO.
Note: I am running HomeBridge on a RaspberryPi with the Somfy Tahoma plugin. This makes the blinds visible to HomeKit. IO works as above. RTS can only be opened or closed (even though the UI allows for the % slider, it doesn't not work). The Tahoma plugin also allows the Tahoma Scenes to be created as HomeKit Switches, which allows you to control multiple blinds or groups, but only with Open, Closed and 'My' control.
What is not clear is:
- how the native Tahoma HomeKit update will handle the RTS blind limitations (mentioned above)
- whether the native Tahoma HomeKit update will allow the 'My' reset height issue.
/s (I just find these stock photos or ones supplied by the companies just so ridiculous.)
PS. Still waiting for that Flying Car and "The Jetsons" world that all the visionaries said we would have by the end of the 20th century. Hmm.
And yes, other things simply won't show up in HomeKit, they actually specifically mentioned RTS as incompatible in their news article.