Our house has roller shutters on all windows and most of them have an electric motor to open and close them. The motors are Schellenberg shaft motors (not sure this is the right English term), that you can configure end positions for and then by applying current to the right pair of pins they move the shutters up and down until the current is removed or one of the endstops is reached. As the motors were installed over a long period of time, the attached control units varied in functionality: different ways to program open/close times, with and without battery for the clock/settings etc, but they all had something in common: no central management and pretty ugly. We decided to replace those control units with regular 2 gang light switches that match the other switches in the house. And as we didn't want to lose the automatic open/close timer, we had to add some smarts to it.
Shelly 2.5 and ESPHome
Say hello to
Shelly 2.5! The Shelly 2.5 is an ESP8266 with two relays attached to it in a super tiny package you can hide in the wall behind a regular switch. Pretty nifty. It originally comes with a
Mongoose OS based firmware and an own app, but ain't nobody needs that, especially nobody who wants to implement some crude logic. That said, the original firmware isn't bad. It has a no-cloud mode, a REST API and does support MQTT for integration into Home Assistant and others.
My ESP firmware of choice is
ESPHome, which you can flash easily onto a Shelly (no matter 1, 2 or 2.5) using a USB TTL adapter that provides 3.3V. Home Assistant has native ESPHome support with auto-discovery, which is much nicer than manually attaching things to MQTT topics.
To get ESPHome compiled for the Shelly 2.5, we'll need a basic configuration like this:
esphome:
name: shelly25
platform: ESP8266
board: modwifi
arduino_version: 2.4.2
We're using
board: modwifi as the Shelly 2.5 (and all other Shellys) has 2MB flash and the usually recommended
esp01_1m would only use 1MB of that - otherwise the configurations are identical (see the PlatformIO entries for
modwifi and
esp01_1m). And
arduino_version: 2.4.2 is what the Internet suggests is the most stable SDK version, and who will argue with the Internet?!
Now an ESP8266 without network connection is boring, so we add a WiFi configuration:
wifi:
ssid: !secret wifi_ssid
password: !secret wifi_password
power_save_mode: none
The
!secret commands load the named variables from
secrets.yaml. While testing, I found the network connection of the Shelly very unreliable, especially when placed inside the wall and thus having rather bad bad reception (-75dBm according to ESPHome). However, setting
power_save_mode: none explicitly seems to have fixed this, even if
NONE is supposed to be the default on ESP8266.
At this point the Shelly has a working firmware and WiFi, but does not expose any of its features: no switches, no relays, no power meters.
To fix that we first need to find out the GPIO pins all these are connected to. Thankfully we can basically copy paste the definition from the
Tasmota (another open-source firmware for ESPs)
template:
pin_led1: GPIO0
pin_button1: GPIO2
pin_relay1: GPIO4
pin_switch2n: GPIO5
pin_sda: GPIO12
pin_switch1n: GPIO13
pin_scl: GPIO14
pin_relay2: GPIO15
pin_ade7953: GPIO16
pin_temp: A0
If we place that into the
substitutions section of the ESPHome config, we can use the names everywhere and don't have to remember the pin numbers.
The configuration for the
ADE7953 power sensor and the
NTC temperature sensor are taken verbatim from the ESPHome documentation, so there is no need to repeat them here.
The configuration for the switches and relays are also rather straight forward:
binary_sensor:
- platform: gpio
pin: $ pin_switch1n
name: "Switch #1"
internal: true
id: switch1
- platform: gpio
pin: $ pin_switch2n
name: "Switch #2"
internal: true
id: switch2
switch:
- platform: gpio
pin: $ pin_relay1
name: "Relay #1"
internal: true
id: relay1
interlock: &interlock_group [relay1, relay2]
- platform: gpio
pin: $ pin_relay2
name: "Relay #2"
internal: true
id: relay2
interlock: *interlock_group
All marked as
internal: true, as we don't need them visible in Home Assistant.
ESPHome and Schellenberg roller shutters
Now that we have a working Shelly 2.5 with ESPHome, how do we control Schellenberg (and other) roller shutters with it?
Well, first of all we need to connect the Up and Down wires of the shutter motor to the two relays of the Shelly. And if they would not be marked as
internal: true, they would show up in Home Assistant and we would be able to flip them on and off, moving the shutters. But this would also mean that we need to flip them off each time after use, as while the motor knows when to stop and will do so, applying current to both wires at the same time produces rather
interesting results. So instead of fiddling around with the relays directly, we define a
time-based cover in our configuration:
cover:
- platform: time_based
name: "$ location Rolladen"
id: rolladen
open_action:
- switch.turn_on: relay2
open_duration: $ open_duration
close_action:
- switch.turn_on: relay1
close_duration: $ close_duration
stop_action:
- switch.turn_off: relay1
- switch.turn_off: relay2
We use a time-based cover because that's the easiest thing that will also turn the relays off for us after the shutters have been opened/closed, as the motor does not "report" any state back. We
could use the integrated power meter of the Shelly to turn off when the load falls under a threshold, but I was too lazy and this works just fine as it is.
Next, let's add the physical switches to it. We could just add
on_press automations to the binary GPIO sensors we configured for the two switch inputs the Shelly has. But if you have kids at home, you'll know that they like to press ALL THE THINGS and what could be better than a small kill-switch against small fingers?
switch:
[ previous definitions go here ]
- platform: template
id: block_control
name: "$ location Block Control"
optimistic: true
- platform: template
name: "Move UP"
internal: true
lambda: -
if (id(switch1).state && !id(block_control).state)
return true;
else
return false;
on_turn_on:
then:
cover.open: rolladen
on_turn_off:
then:
cover.stop: rolladen
- platform: template
name: "Move DOWN"
internal: true
lambda: -
if (id(switch2).state && !id(block_control).state)
return true;
else
return false;
on_turn_on:
then:
cover.close: rolladen
on_turn_off:
then:
cover.stop: rolladen
This adds three more
template switches.
The first one, "Block Control", is exposed to Home Assistant, has no
lambda definition and is set to
optimistic: true, which makes is basically a dumb switch that can be flipped at will and the only thing it does is storing the binary on/off state.
The two others are almost identical. The name differs, obviously, and so does the
on_turn_on automation (one triggers the cover to open, the other to close). And the really interesting part is the
lambda that monitors one of the physical switches and if that is turned on,
plus "Block Control" is off, reports the switch as turned on, thus triggering the automation.
With this we can now block the physical switches via Home Assistant, while still being able to control the shutters via the same.
All this (and a bit more) can be found in my
esphome-configs repository on GitHub, enjoy!
The new FAI version 5.9.4 adds support for the new Ubuntu LTS version 20.04 (focal).
New FAI installation images (including a Ubuntu only ISO) are available from
https://fai-project.org/fai-cd
I've added support for the Debian testing release (currently bullseye) to the
FAIme service for building customized installation and cloud
images. This service still supports the oldstable and stable release
including variants with a backports kernel.
The FAI.me build service is also using the newest FAI version and the
customized ISO images can be booted in an UEFI or legacy BIOS
environment.
https://fai-project.org/FAIme
...even the SD cards were wet!
The last photo my camera took before it died
Tada! Turns out you can dehydrate hardware too!
A few days ago KDE Apps 20.04 were released, and I am happy that thanks to the 
The previous location (debian-plasma at OBS) should be replaced by the following entries in 
My solution up to now was to keep a Unison binary from Buster on my Sid system, and used that binary when syncing to Buster server, but the normal Unison binary when syncing between two sid computers. This created lots of pain, because, when using a incompatible Unison binary, already a simple connect without a sync trial messed up the state files and required a complete resync. And so it happened often that I used the wrong binary, and had to resync a few gigabyte, what a pain.
The Debian maintainer is 
Debian salsa now allows usernames without the 
Continuing a series of blog posts about casual 
The Linux kernel lockdown patches 
Earlier this month, GitLab B.V.'s package signing key expired, requiring
them to rotate their key. This means that anyone who uses one of their
packages needs to jump through a number of manual hoops to update their
apt key configuration, which is an annoying manual process that also
requires people to download random files from the Internet -- something
extrepo was written to prevent. At least they're served over https, but
still.
I didn't notice until today, but I just updated the 