we ended up putting the fyrtur blinds in our condo this month. these are an excellent value. a few nit-picky items that might be helpful for other folks that are considering these blinds.

these notes are applicable only to my experience using homekit and ikea’s tradfri gateway. i assume that this stuff is a dumpster fire from a security perspective and i stick all home automation elements on a separate network segment far away from data i really care about.

dealing with zeroconf across multiple network segments and the firewall operation therein is considered an exercise for the reader.

  • these are zigbee blinds, everything is a bit slower than you’re probably used to from an interaction perspective. dial back your expectations with respect to interactivity. this shit takes time don’t rush it.
  • software updates take time. seriously, a while. if you’re installing a bunch of blinds and you’re doing a batch update, give it overnight.
  • you probably want to have a well placed repeater in your deployment, it’s not strictly required and the “device addition” process is pretty oblique on things here, but subjectively, it seemed to speed things up.
  • be careful about accidentally creating another zigbee network by hitting the pair button on the tradfri gateway. i did this and i wasted a lot of time resetting a few blinds that were on the old network. there’s no obvious way to detect this other than all of a sudden your previously installed and known devices are know disconnected.
  • integration with the apple home app is surprisingly seamless, and it certainly is preferable to driving things with the ikea app. create a few scenes with the home app and siri will pick these up as well.
  • we have a few banks of blinds in our place, i want to be able to control these individually, but this seems to require that you place these in different rooms within the ikea app. come up with a sensible naming scheme and take your time adding and naming the controllers and blinds as you add them to the ikea app and the apple home app. oh, and make sure that you label the controllers associated with the individual blinds to make sure that you know what you’re associating and what it’s paired with. this can get bonkers bonkers quickly.

fyrtur blinds miscellanea

you’re going to have a crapton of left over chargers and usb cables. this doesn’t seem particularly efficient and one wonders why ikea doesn’t just sell a kit to get you going that has a charger, a repeater and a couple of cables to allow parallel charging.

the battery compartments seem a little on the finicky side of things, take care when inserting/removing the battery from the blind. nothing broke on me, but for something that’s potentially going to be frobbed a couple of times a year, it seems to me that they could have done a better job with the design and connectors for that.

meta

  • tags: #homeautomation, #nerd
  • location: Minneapolis, MN
  • weather: 🌩 (Thunderstorm in vicinity) +74°F