The lake place has 18 motorized Somfy shades. I wanted them in Home Assistant. Then Good Night closes the blackout shades, and Good Morning opens them. Nobody searches for an app on vacation. This should have been the easy type of integration. Big vendor, official integration, type in your account, done.
Instead, both of the vendor’s regional servers rejected me with the same message. My hardware “is not using the Overkiz platform and can’t be supported.” That was strange. The hardware sat on the wall and used exactly that platform. The official Somfy app accepted the same credentials without complaint.
Right password, wrong door
An open Home Assistant GitHub issue confirmed the answer. Many people had the same problem. Somfy merged their account systems. The unified login now points to their alarm-and-camera service, not the shade service. Right password, right hardware, wrong door. Nothing on my side could fix it. The mismatch lives in their account plumbing.
Seven taps on the PIN
So I used the back door. The TaHoma hub has a local API. The API ships disabled and undocumented. To enable it, open the hub’s info screen in the Somfy app. Then tap the PIN number seven times.
It is not a settings toggle. It is not a menu. The number gives no sign that it is a button. It is a cheat code. Seven is the standard count for secret menus. Five taps can happen by accident. Ten taps is a cry for help. After seven taps, a Developer Mode menu appears.
From that menu, you generate an access token. One trap cost me a round of 401 errors. The app displays the token truncated to about twenty characters. If you type what you see, you copy a stub. Use the copy button. The real token is longer than the box that shows it.
The hub among the smart TVs
One more small detective step. Five devices on that network answer on the same HTTPS port. To find the hub, I read the TLS certificate of each device. I stopped at the certificate signed by Overkiz. The hub hid among the smart TVs.
I pointed Home Assistant’s Overkiz integration at the hub in local mode. It found all 18 shades. Each room has a pair: one blackout shade and one sheer shade. The scenes work.
Five shades arrived as anonymous Zigbee entities. The hub never named them. So an afternoon of work waits for me. I will open each one and shout “that one is the dining room” across the house. Automation is glamorous work.
The workaround beat the front door
The workaround beat the front door. The official path routes every “close the blinds” command through Somfy’s cloud. The seven-tap path keeps everything on the local network. It works when the internet does not. It sends no data anywhere. I would not have selected local-only on day one. I select it now.