Introduction

Last year I bought the Vera Lite  Zwave domotica controller to control some lights in and out the house. I also own 4 RTS controlled devices from Somfy (2 vertical blinds / 1 horizontal blind / 1 heater) and I thought it would be cool to hook those up to the Vera Lite.

Somfy has its own solutions to interface Zwave to RTS:

• ZRTSI: Zwave to RTS interface, 16 channel
• URTSI I: RS232 to RTS interface, 4 channel
• URTSI II: RS232 to RTS interface, 16 channel

These solutions will cost over 300 USD and only offer remote control of the RTS devices. Still no solution for my requirements to automate the blinds to some extent. I need to be able to check for open windows, measure the temperature, measure the sun light.

I started looking to alternatives and found out that some people are dry wiring existing Somfy Telis remotes to a microcontroller and have this microcontroller interface with the Vera Lite.

• Mark Kuipers wired a Somfy Telis 4 remote to a USB interface here
• Andreas Böhler wired a Somfy Telis 4 remote to an Arduino here

I decided to start a little project to start doing something similar.

Read more in my next post: The Plan