Somfy Zibgee 3.0 Release

A Blind Man View

So, let’s cut all the marketing speak and tech words. I’ll give you a Blindman’s opinion of what this all means. 

Firstly, Somfy is a great motor producer. They produce really high-quality motors, and they’re recognized around the world as the premier supplier of motors. However, that has sometimes meant they have been a little staid and slow to introduce new technology, partly because of how important consistency, quality, and reliability were to them. Introducing Zigbee is, therefore, a big deal!

The key change is this – we are moving away from remote control technology, where the remote control sends a radio signal to put the blinds up or down, into the world of smart home ecosystems using Zigbee as the platform are used to send the ‘up/stop/down’ command.

Somfy is releasing four major elements: 

1. A motor with an integrated Zigbee chip, which means that it can receive and send signals on the Zigbee frequency and Zigbee protocol. 
2. A Zigbee set of remote controls, which send an up, down, or stop signal via that Zigbee frequency and Zigbee protocol. 
3. The Tahoma Hub, which acts as an interface for Zigbee Motors to be able to interact with the Internet. It acts as a connection between the Zigbee frequency and Zigbee protocol, which is operating your blinds, and the Somfy app.
4. Upgraded consumer and installer apps for customers to be able to easily operate their blinds and for installers to be able to more easily set them up in the customer’s home.

For customers that have no smart home integration, these four elements are fantastic. But for consumers who already have Zigbee components and systems in their smart home, this is even better. Now you don’t need the Somfy remote controls, the Somfy Tahoma hub, or the Somfy app to operate your blinds; you can use almost any smart home integration to send an UP/STOP/DOWN message to the Somfy motors. 

This is incredibly important because that’s what we’ve been waiting for: major motor brands with high-quality motors that have integrated a generic protocol and frequency to be able to operate our blinds from the infrastructure we already have.

The Somfy app is great, but what really matters is being able to control all of our home in one place, whether that be through Apple, Google, Amazon, or an open-source project like Home Assistant. This motor is going to be much easier for us to integrate in a generic way without needing to have all of the extra Somfy bits, and that’s a big deal. I suspect we’ll see other motor companies coming soon with the same approach but likely based on Matter and Thread rather than Zigbee.