Earlier this year I decided to automate an existing bedroom roller blind in the hopes of encouraging a more natural wake-up with sunlight. Exploring a few different options I landed on the Aqara Roller Shade Driver E1. It supports a wide range of window chains, has good reviews, comes from a reliable vendor and is at a fair price.

Getting hands-on, the design and build quality are great. Since it's compact and white, it blends in well with white window frames and can lift our 180cm x 210cm Ikea blind without too much effort. It doesn't come with a solar panel like some other competitors but only needs to be charged once every two months (when used up / down once per day). In my experience, this holds up in the real world. I've had it set up for about 4.5 months and only charged it twice. This isn't much of a burden with one blind but I can imagine a whole house of blinds the charging would start to get tedious. Fitting out a whole house I'd lean towards an integrated solution that's ideally tied into mains power.  

Blind Adjustment

First up the blinds need to be rolling smoothly. If they're in a state of chaos you'll be automating chaos into your life. The E1 does a decent job of sensing the additional friction of a jammed blind and stopping but sometimes manual intervention is required to release it. Thankfully I was able to get my blind rolling straight with a bit of duct tape on the cylinder thanks to the video below.

The E1

Setting up the Aqara E1 is straightforward, simply take off the existing chain clip and replace it with the E1 bracket. I'm not sure if they've done anything special with the sizing of the bracket, maybe I just got lucky but the device lined up perfectly with the existing hole! Once fitting, set your upper and lower limit and you can start using it like a regular electric blind!

Home Assistant

Since the E1 is a Zigbee device it can pair directly to Home Assistant via a Zigbee coordinator without installing any third-party apps or accounts for initial setup. Zigbee is also great because it means less clutter on your WiFi network and a more reliable mesh for your Zigbee devices!

When I first connected the E1, I found it dropping off the network. It would work immediately after pairing but drop off once idle for an extended period.  This was because the E1 uses a modern implementation of Zigbee whereas my controller was running an older firmware. An update to my Zigbee controller quickly fixed the connectivity issues.

The only downside of pairing with Home Assistant (via ZHA) is the lack of battery information. This prevents setting low battery alerts when the driver needs charging. Admittedly, I haven't bothered to investigate this as it requires charging so infrequently although it's on my to-do list.

Automation

Initially, I set up morning and evening automation through Home Assistant. This worked well but over time became frustrating because the automation had to be updated whenever I changed my morning alarm. Instead, I now expose the blinds through Apple HomeKit and have a personal automation to open the blinds when my morning alarm goes off.

Waking up

When I purchased the E1 I naively assumed I would be woken by the sunlight beaming in through the window from day one. However, for the first few weeks, it was the noise of the blinds moving that woke me up. It's surprising how sensitive we are to noise, particularly noises that we're not used to hearing while asleep. Although the motor isn't silent it's definitely not loud by any means. In fact, the blinds themselves make quite a bit of noise. Now that I'm climatized to it, I barely notice.

Overall I've been really happy with this purchase. It's an awesome bit of tech that requires minimal effort to set up.