Blog entries from December, 2025

The two bedrooms (one I use as my study) in my house (technically a unit) have large windows that face west. This means that they get full afternoon sun which can be a problem in the warmer months. Fortunately there is canvas awnings which do the simple job of keeping the direct sun off the window glass, the first layer of managing temperature.

Despite being the “automatic” type these awnings are operated manually. This naming comes from the 1970s and the awnings are the type on a spring loaded roll that you pull down, then lock in place on arms that extend out. Pulling down on the awning will unlock the arms and the awning rolls back up.

The specific awnings I had were quite old, the canvas had been replaced by the previous owners and at least one mechanism looked like it was possibly original. Basically all the metal parts were either rusting or the paint was flaking off, so it had been on my list for a while to tidy it up in some way.

Until I recently went to use them for the first time this season and one of the plastic end caps disintegrated, making the awning unusable.

So now instead of of background job to tidy them up, I had the more urgent job of getting them replaced before the heat of summer kicked in. So I started to get quotes, but I didn’t just ask for one quote from each installer, I asked for the price to replace with the same automatic awning type and also for a price to replace with a motorized awning.

The quotes were fairly consistent: around $3k for automatic or around $6k for motorized. However that $6k did not include the cost of an electrician running power to each awning.

I also didn’t know what support the motorized awnings would have for integrating with home assistant, because if I was going to get something that could be automated, I wanted it integrated with what I already have.

Them I remembered something, with all the things I have done with home automation, almost everything have been monitoring. The only thing I control is the heating and cooling, mainly to have it on a schedule, and to turn it off if the exterior doors are open. So did I need to automate this? If I am home it is a simple task to pull them down, then later in the day (or if it rains or is very windy) go back out and raise them up.

It was also more than double (remember an electrician wasn’t included) the price, so I stayed with manually operated “automatic” awnings which were installed today:

Almost fifteen years ago I picked up a Logitech Harmony 650 universal remote to control my television, bluray player and whatever other media devices I might have connected. It was easy to setup and I didn’t need to change the config for many years.

Four years ago I found that my television could no longer play media using new codecs, so I switched over to a Raspberry Pi running Kodi. I was glad that I was able to reconfigure the Harmony 650 to add an MCE remote which the Kodi supported.

A year ago that original television died and I replaced it with another Samsung mainly because of what was available at a decent price. I mentioned at the time that the remote included with the new television was unusable, but fortunately the remote from the old Samsung television still worked, and which meant I only needed minimal tweaks to the config on the Harmony.

What I never got around to writing about was that a year earlier (so two years ago from now) some of the buttons on the Harmony 650 started to not respond all the time. As this is a really old model I started to look around for a modern replacement. I didn’t want something that required wifi and bluetooth or an app on my phone, I wanted a replacement that mostly used IR. I thought I had found the answer in the Sofabaton U2.

I did not:

• it is configured via an app on a phone, which a number of times forgot all the previous config so I had to start from scratch
• there are multiple options for an Windows Media Center remote, some didn’t work at all (so not MCE RC6?) and the ones that did work would be received by Kodi as multiple presses, no matter what config settings I tried
• the macros and device selection looked promising, but I couldn’t get anything as nice as activities on the Harmony

I didn’t like the Sofabaton and eventually some of the key buttons on the Harmony stopped working, so for the last few months I have been using individual remotes: fifteen year old Samsung television remote, a HP MCE remote I picked up a while ago as a backup

I don’t know how I didn’t come across this earlier, but I found that you can get replacement button membranes for the Harmony 650 remote (also other remotes).

That was my task this afternoon, and now the Harmony is working perfectly. This is what I should have done instead of wasting money on the Sofabaton…