Configuring Somfy on the controller

There are two licenses for Somfy available to be licensed - Standard (wired) and RTS (wireless). Please ensure that you have the correct license applied.  Communication with an RTS product will not work with a standard license (and vice versa).  You cannot mix somfy and somfy RTS products on the same controller.

In both cases, the controller will create an associated control gear for each channel which you can then treat as a regular dali light to communicate with, including adding the device to dali groups.  Some aspects of the dali light may not function (for instance, power on level / system failure level) and there are further limitations for Somfy RTS, discussed later.

For Standard, up to 12 channels will be represented as control gear channels of the controller.  The first channel (marked with "product name - 1", ie, application controller pro - 1) is always automatically created, this channel sends commands to the broadcast somfy address.  All somfy devices that are connected should respond to commands on this address.

Any subsequent channel created had been discovered by a querying process on controller startup.  These channels will be marked ("product name - 2", "product name - 3" et).  It is therefore important to have already pre-wired your blinds before starting the controller.  Standard mode Somfy allows for sending relative positions (ie, 50%).  This can be simply achieved by firing the appropriate DIRECT ARC / SCENE commands at the control gear.

Pictured below is a controller that has created a broadcast address and found a single SDN blind connected.

For RTS, 10 channels are created, regardless of existence.  These channels are hard coded to be targeting addresses beginning at 0x050000 onwards (ie, channel 0 control gear will be 0x050000, channel 1 will be 0x050001 etc).   You must also put the Node ID found on the bottom of the unit into the Somfy configuration on the cloud, which should be placed in the RTS serial field on the controller in the Add-ons section. 

RTS transmitters do not support sending relative percentage commands to the blind (ie, there is no way to tell the blind to go to 50%).  We have mapped the 3 commands they support to DALI commands UP, DOWN and DIRECT ARC 255 (STOP). 

Contrary to dali (where the device will fade/move for 200ms on any UP/DOWN command), the blind will continue to move until the limit or a STOP is sent.  Therefore, to get the blind to go to halfway, you would need to have a sequence that sends UP/DOWN and then waits an appropriate amount of time, before sending DIRECT ARC 255 (STOP). 

In controller versions 1.9.200 and above, the controller will additionally convert DIRECT ARC 254 / RECALL_MAX_LEVEL to UP and DIRECT ARC 0 / OFF to DOWN.  If a scene is 254 / 0, this will also be  appropriately converted to UP / DOWN.  This allows you to fully open / close without having to send UP / DOWN.