Preorders Start For ZemiSmart Matter over Thread Roller Shade Motor
Despite historically being tied to Zigbee and WiFi, ZemiSmart has been turning out a fair bit of stuff that reveals its commitment to newer tech. With the recent release of their Smart Matter Hub M1, which also includes a Thread Border Router, they’re definitely going fast towards the new smart home standard.
Additionally, the company is now open for preorders of their latest Matter over Thread product, the Matter over Thread Roller Shade Motor. Similar to a product by Motion Blinds, this is a semi-retrofit solution to making your dumb blinds smart, although, unlike Aqara’s Roller Shade Driver solution, this doesn’t need to control a beaded chain or stick to the side of a wall – it sits inside your existing roller shade tube, which has to be 36-38mm in diameter.
The tube motor itself contains a 5000mAh battery that can be recharged via a USB-C port at one end of the motor, offering 30rpm, and a rated torque of 1NM. There’s no mention of battery life between charges, but based on the numbers, it should last between 4-6 months before needing to be recharged.
As this is Matter enabled, it’ll work with all four smart home platforms, and due to the Thread protocol, you only need to ensure there’s a Matter controller and a Thread Border Router in your home to allow it to connect and function as intended. Luckily, all current Apple Home Hubs (Apple TV4K (3rd gen & 4th gen/128GB), HomePod Mini, and HomePod (2nd gen) can act as both a Matter controller and a Thread Border Router, although if you don’t have the latter, ZemiSmart’s own M1 hub can fulfil that role too.
You can preorder the motor directly from ZemiSmart’s own store now where it’s offered at US$79.80 (40% off), but you can obtain an extra 15% off that price using the code ZMVIP15 from now until the end of Nov 24th (PST). The shipping date of December 25th has also been announced, so whilst it won’t make it in time for a nice present, you can still get a bargain for the new year.
I’ll be really interested to see how the reviews of these turn out in comparison to the Eve Motion Blinds kit. The Eve kit is really well designed and manufactured, but is also really expensive at $200/motorized shade. At $80/shade, this seems much more reasonable, so if this is a quality product then it will be very competitive.
I haven’t been in a position to test these out, but I have tried out the Zigbee and the Matter over WiFi versions (I only reviewed the latter), and both were pretty quiet, and gave me no issues. So if these are like those but come with Matter over Thread, then it’s a bargain. The only thing to consider is that the Eve MotionBlinds option does come with adaptors for difference tube diameters, so with the ZemiSmart option only able to fit tubes between 36-38mm in diameter, some wouldn’t be able to use it.
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