Michał Leśniewski's Rolek Integrates a Powered Roller Shutter Installation with Home Assistant

Maker Michał Leśniewski has built a smart shutter system, designed to integrate an existing powered shutter installation with Home Assistant — by having an Espressif ESP8266 operate its original remote control.

"It's a tiny device for controlling electric roller shutters over Wi-Fi using a web interface, a REST API [Application Programming Interface], or from Home Assistant," Leśniewski explains of the project, dubbed Rolek. "To build this system I used an existing 433MHz shutter remote with a broken display. The [Espressif] ESP8266 is wired to the remote's buttons, simulating presses to control the shutters. This way I didn't need to reverse-engineer the 433MHz protocol or crack the rolling code it apparently uses."

Rolek, which has been in-use for "a few years now," initially began life as a replacement display for the partially-broken remote — using a web interface in place of the original display. Over time, though, it has received various feature upgrades, and now includes the ability to track the position of each shutter in the system, open or shut individual shutters or groups of shutters including to percentage-based partial positions, and support for integration with Home Assistant via MQTT.

In addition to the Home Assistant integration, the Espressif ESP8266 at the heart of the build provides a web interface as well as a RESTful API — requiring only simple HTTP POST requests to endpoints that provide the ability to open, close, stop, and move any individual shutter or group of shutters, and can also reset the remote control by cutting its power feed from the microcontroller.

Details and source code are available in the Rolek GitHub repository under the reciprocal GNU General Public License 3; additional information is available in Leśniewski's Reddit post. A gallery of additional imagery is also available on Imgur.