Roller Shade Control - ISY -> Insteon/Arduino?

[meestermike]

Hello all,

 

Forum newbie here. I am pretty much sold on buying an ISY-994i in the near term future, but I have also settled on using some motorized roller shades in my home automation setup. I personally find the Somfy motors and other high end commercial shades a bit on the pricey side, so I have sourced my own 12v roller shades that I intend to control with relays actuated by a home automation controller in one form or another.

 

All that said, I am looking to put together somehting a little more sophisticated than either 100% up or 100% down. I have been toying with the idea of programming an arduino board to control the relays and somehow link it either via Insteon or IP network to an ISY for control. However, as much as I intend for the shades to be automated, the wife is surely going to want to press a button or two on the wall and control the blinds manually.

 

Therein lies my dilemna. I would like to make this sophisticated enough to where I could, for example, use a SwitchLinc Dimmer on the wall (with the LED ladder display) to manually control the shades. Such that the lamp level indicated on the LED display would match the relative position of the shades. I know this can be done -- just need to find a way to get the arduino to act as if it is part of a 3-way circuit.

 

I have searched and searched and found only a handful of folks who have played around with using an Insteon PLM to talk to an Arduino. I am beginning to think maybe a better way would be to use something like the ISY to programattically catch the status changes of the manual dimmer input and foward that via a network resource to an ethernet-connected Arduino. The question is how to do it and if it can be done in realtime or near-realtime.

 

Appreciate anyone's thoughts and newbie patience.

 

Thanks!

[Xathros]

I would go the IP / Network resource route. Depending on the arduino's response time, I would expect you could get very near real time responses unless the ISY is very busy with other tasks at the time.

 

I would be interested in what you have sourced for the roller shades as I am also considering building my own.

 

-Xathros