Controlling and visualizing venetian blinds

Add-ons UIs
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1

Hi,

I’m quite new here but using OH for about 2 years to control our venetian blinds (via Z-Wave, Qubino ZMNHCD Flush Shutter). Initially in the default “Shutter” mode, now moving to the “Venetian” mode to have better control over the slats rotation (via an additional ‘Slider’ Element Type in the Sitemap).

After some try and error it’s now working quite fine, especially thanks to this tutorial/example post and some additional tweaking (according to the linked post the range of the slats angle is between 0 and 50 (or 50-100), but in my case the range is from 0 to 100 and results in a much more accurate moving behavior compared to the first tries).

However, there is still room for improvement when it comes to controlling the slats:

I think the ‘Slider’ element is the most intuitive and simplest way to control the angle, but actually only a few steps (positions) are really used. In any case 0% and 100% and then maybe:

  • 35% to lighten the bathroom but not to be seen by the neighbors
  • 60% to let more air through the open window but have still some sunscreen
  • (depending on the season/weather maybe another value too)

So I have to set the ‘step’ parameter to 5 - otherwise the slider won’t allow 35% and 60%, but all other 17 slider values (5/10/15/20/25/30/40/45/50/55/65/70/75/80/85/90/95) are useless and makes it unnecessarily difficult to exactly adjust to 35% resp. 60%

According to the docs there is no way to set a predefined list of possible steps. Or maybe I’m missing something or there is another approach to implement my desired use case?

Btw, I’m still on OH 2.5 (openHABian) but I’m willing to upgrade to the latest OH3 as soon as I have some spare time for this.

Thanks for any hints and best regards,
Markus

2

You’re not going to be able to get to where you want with a slider, be it on the sitemap or in MainUI. in OH 3. Your best bet will be to use a proxy Item expose with the slider and a rule that translates ranges of values to the discrete commands to the blinds. For example, 0-15 → 0, 16-45 → 35, and so on. Short of that you’ll hve to use some other widget, such as a switch with mappings.

3

Thanks for your idea. Sounds like a working approach although I’m not yet familiar with such an implementation.

Just to be sure I understand you right:

  • In the UI I would still see a slider which has for example 20 steps but behind the scenses the effective value is mapped to 4 discrete values.
  • Unsure why you suggested a switch widget - I suppose that a switch can be only ON or OFF (or mapped to something other) but nothing else than these two states. But I need about 4-5 states.
4

No. Imagine “radio buttons” A B C D - or in your case 0% 35% 60% 100% or something. Switch here is the name of the UI widget, which is more flexible than just being used with Switch type Items.
Sitemap keyword is “mappings”.

5

ah, cool… makes sense. thank you!