Blinds and Shades

I just recently started looking into automated shades. I started out with a set of SmartWings blackout roller shades. They’re not premium shades, but for the price I feel like I’m getting my money’s worth. I also feel like the tech-quality-price combo is at the right balance for me to want to put them in throughout a large portion of our house. In the process of doing my research, I learned quite a bit about the available options.

My setup

As I mentioned above, I have the SmartWings shades with RF only control. I didn’t spend the extra money on the HomeLink version. I use the Bond bridge instead of SmartWing’s smart-link bridge since Bond easily works with local control. When using DeyiSmart blinds, you need to get the remote as it’s needed to complete the pairing process with Bond. I like this setup and I’m probably going to replicate it throughout my house.

One downside to the Bond bridge is that you can’t tell the blinds to open to a certain spot. I found one spot in the documentation that this may be doable with Bond Pro, but I’m not paying all of that extra money for that one feature. This is doable with the smart-link/Tuya bridge.

Everything’s different, but everything’s the same

When I received my SmartWings shades I noticed that there was other branding on the box. It turns out they don’t make their own blinds. They are drop-shipped from DeyiSmart in China. SmartWings also sells a Smart Link device. This is actually a Tuya IoT gateway device that works with a white labelled copy of Tuya’s smart home software. Tuya is a Chinese based IoT company running their backend out of AWS. There are some hacks you can do for local control, but I decided I don’t like this solution and SmartWings was kind enough to refund me even though they have a no refund policy.

I switched to getting the Bond bridge for local control. I know there are other options for local control of RF devices, but based on some posts I have read about them, none are as polished as Bond. You get what you pay for. In the process of setting up Bond, I noticed that a lot of brands have the exact same setup process. After checking out their websites, I’m pretty confident that all of those with the same setup process use DiyaSmart and Tuya

Brands who’s products look like a white labelling of the DeyiSmart/Tuya combo:

• Alta Bliss
• AMP Motorization
• PowerShades RF (I used this setup to get my SmartWings shade to work)
• Rollease Acmeda
• SmartWings
• Unique
• Wynmotion Shade

I’m fairly happy with my shade so I’m not saying this is a bad thing, but when comparing prices, it’s something to keep in mind.

Of course, DeyiSmart is not the only company making motorized blinds. There were at least 3 other technologies in the Bond blinds setup list, but DeyiSmart seems to be the most common solution.