Setting Up a Semi-Smart Tubular Motor for My Blinds ZM25TQ-0.8/25 with Home Assistant
I recently installed a Zemismart Smart Roller Shade Motor (model ZM25TQ-0.8/25) which I bought from AliExpress and integrated it with Home Assistant. While it worked in the end, I encountered a few hurdles—especially with Zigbee connectivity and configuration in Home Assistant.
Zigbee Integration Challenges
Initially, I used the default Zigbee Home Automation (ZHA) integration in Home Assistant, but it didn’t provide the configuration options I needed
- Up/down controls were reversed (clicking “up” lowered the blinds and vice versa).
Following community recommendations, I switched to Zigbee2MQTT, which required:
- Installing the Mosquitto MQTT broker.
- Re-pairing all my Zigbee devices, which was a fair amount of work
Configuring the Blind Motor
Zigbee2MQTT allowed more granular controls, but figuring out how to configure the bling motor was tricky. Online advice (from ChatGPT) was too generic.
Eventually, I found the printed instruction manual that came with the bling motor, which helped me:
- Reverse the motor direction by publishing a message via Home Assistant’s Developer Tools.
- Note: The menu option once called “Services” is now labeled “Actions.” You’ll need to use mqtt.publish and include a correctly formatted JSON payload (ChatGPT helped me format this).
service: mqtt.publish
data:
topic: zigbee2mqtt/Office Blind/set
payload: '{"options":{"reverse_direction":true}}'
qos: 0
retain: false
Once that was done, the controls worked correctly—open closed the blinds, and close opened them, as expected.
Setting Limit Positions
Home Assistant doesn’t support setting the upper, lower, or middle limits directly. For that, I had to use the included rf remote control that came with the blind:
- Pair the remote with the motor:
- Press the motor’s “Set” button once.
- Then press the “Up” button on the remote.
- Unpairing the remote:
- Press the remote’s setting button five times, then press the “Up” button once.
- Set upper/lower limits:
- Move the blind to the desired position.
- Press the remote’s setting button once, then the direction button (up or down) to save the limit.
Once configured, Home Assistant respected the limits when issuing open/close commands via Zigbee2MQTT.
Orignal Manual
I’ve attached the relevant MQTT configuration payload, remote control steps, and a copy of the manual below for anyone trying the same thing.
Hope this helps someone avoid the setup headaches I ran into!
