At the bottom of the case, the reset button is conveniently placed next to a 5V USB-C port. Aqara installing a USB-C instead of MicroUSB port gives me some assurance of the quality of the device and the company’s willingness to follow and adapt newer standards. As I mentioned earlier, this smart shade driver has been commissioned for three months, and I have never had any issues with it during this period. This is a well-polished product that streamlines your daily activity with the minimum effort and, has proven to be a reliable helper to my home.

Underneath the Open labelled cover, the bead rotating plate is placed on the motor axis. If you need to change it to accommodate different cords, it can be removed by simply pulling it upwards. invert_cover: Inverts the cover position, false: open=100,close=0, true: open=0,close=100 (default false). The value must be trueor false One-Button Control: Thanks to the Aqara Home app, the full operation of your roller shade can be done by pressing only one button such as the Aqara Mini Switch. I can’t speak for anyone else, but since I live in a home with roller blinds in each bedroom, it had been a goal of mine to at least get some of these blinds automated. With the cost of custom automated blinds being out of my reach, ‘Retrofit’ options (meaning a solution that adds smart functionality to existing blinds) seemed to be the easiest option.All-Round Compatibility: Compatible with most popular ecosystems and can be controlled by voice. HomeKit, Alexa, Google, IFTTT, Alice, Marusya are supported. All-Round Compatibility: Compatible with most popular ecosystems and can be controlled by voice. HomeKit, Alexa, Google, IFTTT, Alice, and Marusya are supported. With any retrofit product or any smart home product in general, you want something easy to install and get up and running. Thankfully, that applies to the Aqara Roller Shade Driver E1.

Alexa is my weapon of choice for creating triggers to control the blind, and again, integration is super simple. Just discover the devices and enable the Aqara skill. Once that's done, you can create routines like you would any other. For example, you can use voice, time of day, sunrise and sunset to control the blinds while using other smart devices to trigger a routine. You can also control the percentage you want the blind to open. What I like: User-Defined Opening/Closing: The user will be able to pre-set a number of desired open/close percentages and switch between them easily.

How to configure the app

Custom Ringtones and Timelapse: Custom ringtones are finally here! Users’ favourite feature allows the G2H Pro to play uploaded recordings and use them in automation. Apart from that, the camera now supports timelapse clips generation, which allows summarizing the day in one short video. As for the downside, I puzzled my brain and can only think of one tiny hiccup. During the configuration of scenarios, I was confused by ‘Time’ and ‘Acting Time’ for part of the conditions to be met. For some reason, when I set a ‘Time’, I could not save the scenario successfully. Apart from that, the shade driver E1 is a perfect solution to add smart control for the roller shades. Disclosure: We were provided this product by Aqara free of charge to use and review. That does not influence our views. If your coordinator firmware version is older, some entities are not completely functional in ZHA (eg. the cover entity does not know the exact position of the roller blind)