Protocol for BOFU tubular motor

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Issue in brief

After purchasing a BOFU tubular motor for motorizing my shades I noticed that Pimatic does not recognize the protocol like it does with my Nexa wall plugs.

This is the tubular motor that I assumed was common within the home automation community:

I post this now as I believe that there may be more people out there who are interested in controlling this kind of motors. If I am just overlooking something then maybe there are more people out there who are overlooking the same thing and could be helped by some guidance.

Actions so far

Knowing that there is a rawshutter I set out to capture the up, down and stop signals from the remote delivered with the motor by following the steps of lukx in another post on this forum.

Notably, since the time of that post the interface has changed as to also require a pulseCount.

Pressing the up, down and stop buttons on my remote control I captured the following data in homeduino debug mode.

# Up
data: "RF receive 1644 288 692 7364 0 0 0 0 011221121221122112211221212121211212211212121221211212121212122121121212122121122123"
received: [ 288, 692, 1644, 7364 ] 200110010110011001100110101010100101100101010110100101010101011010010101011010011013
data: "RF receive 1616 288 692 7380 0 0 0 0 011221121221122112211221212121211212211212121221211212121212122121121212122121122123"
received: [ 288, 692, 1616, 7380 ] 200110010110011001100110101010100101100101010110100101010101011010010101011010011013

# Stop
data: "RF receive 1632 288 692 7364 0 0 0 0 011221121221122112211221212121211212211212211221121212121212122121121212121221121223"
received: [ 288, 692, 1632, 7364 ] 200110010110011001100110101010100101100101100110010101010101011010010101010110010113
data: "RF receive 1620 284 692 7376 0 0 0 0 011221121221122112211221212121211212211212211221121212121212122121121212121221121223"
received: [ 284, 692, 1620, 7376 ] 200110010110011001100110101010100101100101100110010101010101011010010101010110010113

# Down
data: "RF receive 1600 284 696 7380 0 0 0 0 011221121221122112211221212121211212211212211212121212121212122121121212121221211223"
received: [ 284, 696, 1600, 7380 ] 200110010110011001100110101010100101100101100101010101010101011010010101010110100113
data: "RF receive 1616 284 692 7372 0 0 0 0 011221121221122112211221212121211212211212211212121212121212122121121212121221211223"
received: [ 284, 692, 1616, 7372 ] 200110010110011001100110101010100101100101100101010101010101011010010101010110100113

From this I have picked out the pulseLength = [288, 692, 1632 7388].

I do want to stress that I’ve noticed that these figures appear to vary (as they do in lukz’s post mention earlier).
Perhaps there is some guidance as to which numbers to pick in this process?

Also, I’ve set pulseCount = 84 due to the “message” (2001...00113) being 84 characters long (read this somewhere, can’t remember where).

Inserting the messages sniffed from pushing the up, down and stop buttons into pulsesUp, pulsesDown and pulsesStop I ended up with the following configuration.

    {
      "protocols": [
        {
          "name": "rawshutter",
          "options": {
            "pulseCount": 84,
            "pulseLengths": [
              "288",
              "692",
              "1632",
              "7388"
            ],
            "pulsesUp": "200110010110011001100110101010100101100101010110100101010101011010010101011010011013",
            "pulsesDown": "200110010110011001100110101010100101100101010101010101010101011010010101010110100113",
            "pulsesStop": "200110010110011001100110101010100101100101100110010101010101011010010101010110010113"
          }
        }
      ],
      "id": "shader1",
      "name": "Shader",
      "class": "HomeduinoRFShutter"
    }

Using the device in Pimatic outputs the following in the homeduino debug console.

[pimatic-homeduino] Sending Protocol: rawshutter pulseCount:84 pulseLengths:288,692,1632,7388 pulsesUp:200110010110011001100110101010100101100101010110100101010101011010010101011010011013 pulsesDown:200110010110011001100110101010100101100101010101010101010101011010010101010110100113 pulsesStop:200110010110011001100110101010100101100101100110010101010101011010010101010110010113 command:down all:false state:false Pin:4 Repeats:7
[pimatic-homeduino] data: "ACK"

Now of course, this has no effect. The homeduino transceiver works wonderfully otherwise.

Having exhausted online searches and posts on this forum, I would like to ask the people of this powerful forum for any insights into this matter.

Thank you in advance.

Carl

Hi!

As I am the author of the rawshutter device I, at first glance I thought your configuration is correct, however, a closer look reveals that you use strings in the pulse length array, this should be integers but maybe it doesn’t really matter as the communication to homeduino is in textmode.

I developed the rawshutter (and rawswitch) device to be able to connect unsupported protocols with pimatic, and I also use it myself to debug protocols.

Unfortunately not all kind of protocols are currently supported by the homeduino, even if you use the raw protocols. I have faced this problem myself with the screen I use for my beamer and I’m currently controlling the screen using the serial interface and not via RF

Hi, thank you for your response! I am indeed satisfied with my answer.

Thinking aloud however: the challenge then of course is how to control the motors using a wire I presume. Cannot see how I would interface with them in a wired way. Controlling the power to the motors will of course have no effect. This is the drawback of having such a neat interface as the RF.

As a general shout out I’d be grateful for inputs on how to work around this.

Again, thank you for rawshutter and your answer!

One idea I have now is to use rflink which lists Bofu tubular motor EY1612 as a supported device along with the rflink-plugin for Pimatic.

Updates will follow.

did you check if this is a rolling code or always the same rf transmission when pushing the buttons?

@leader21 The data is the same for each transmission, thank you for bringing that up!

As @rrooggiieerr said, try to provide the pulse lengths as numbers

    {
      "protocols": [
        {
          "name": "rawshutter",
          "options": {
            "pulseCount": 84,
            "pulseLengths": [
              288,
              692,
              1632,
              7388
            ],
            "pulsesUp": "200110010110011001100110101010100101100101010110100101010101011010010101011010011013",
            "pulsesDown": "200110010110011001100110101010100101100101010101010101010101011010010101010110100113",
            "pulsesStop": "200110010110011001100110101010100101100101100110010101010101011010010101010110010113"
          }
        }
      ],
      "id": "shader1",
      "name": "Shader",
      "class": "HomeduinoRFShutter"
    }

@leader21 I did try that but without success, but really thank you for pointing that out.

Ok sorry then I’m out …
The only thing that I can think of would be a to try a rawswitch instead but guess that doesn’t matter anyway.