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02. Hardware hack

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Psycho edited this page Jun 21, 2018 · 8 revisions

New hack

I will leave this guide here for the history, but I have made another hack ready, to replace the reed relays and make the mod a bit stronger, better, more professional, cleaner. It involves you making your own PCB and I can gladly make it for you against a small payment to cover the material needed. Contact me if interested. I will soon publish the guide to make the pcb part

Hardware hack

Waaiiiiit! Drop that screwdriver!! Before we start messing our Velux controller we must make sure it is connected to your installation as we are going to remove all the buttons, leaving you with no possibilities to interact manually with your windows until we have the program running! Reset your Velux controller and make sure:

  • To add all your Velux components.
  • To not add any shortcut to P1 and P2!
  • To turn off display sleeping by by going to Menu => User settings => Display => Sleep mode => off

This tutorial covers windows and blinders, I don’t have any Velux lights unfortunately, but the process should be the same. Be sure to create the rooms on your remote and add them their respective components.

Ok, if you forget a few things, you’ll always be able to finish the remote installation with your keyboard at a later point. Let’s go!

  • Turn your remote upside down
  • Remove the battery cover and the batteries
  • Unscrew the 2 torx screws
  • Use a blade to open the controller as it is clipped together
  • Remove the card from its plastic holder
  • The buttons are protected under a tiny plastic sheet, remove it. Turn the card around, there’s a lonely button, the reset button, that is covered as well, uncover it too
  • Unsolder the battery contacts, we won’t need them anymore and will power the card through our Raspberry. The top one is +, the bottom one is -.
  • Cut 16 wires of roughly 110mm in length, strip and tin them. I used black and red wires, old school, but red for + and black for –
  • Cut a piece of bakelite test board of roughly 102x25mm. You’ll need a grid of at least 40x9 holes. Cut it in the height, so that you have 102mm connection lines
  • We will power the relays from the pi gpios (3.3v) and one ground only. Check the scheme to cut the tracks. Schools teach you to cut the tracks with a drill. I use a Dremel, nicer and easier. Note that the 45° cut on the lower left corner is only for you to keep the track in the next images, you don’t need to cut it. Note the 0,0 coordinates on the top left corner. Imagine the holes as coordinates, the top left corner being 0,0 and the lower right hole being 9,40

  • Solder the reed relays on the board. Beware, they have a polarity to respect! Make sure the pin 3 (+) is on the track that is cut intermittently and the pin 5 (-) is on the track that goes through the whole board

  • Solder the gpio pins. Use the male side on the board and leave the female side for the raspberry

  • Solder a red male-female wire on 3,7 (Red spot on the image) and two black male-female wires on 1,40 and 7,40 (Blue spots on the image). These will go to the raspberry to get some 5v and 2 grounds.

  • Let’s attack the Velux card now… We have 8 buttons to hack. We do not touch the P1 and P2 buttons as it’s useless to pilot them from the raspberry. Have a close look at one of the buttons. It is basically an outer ring and an inner contact. When you press the button, you technically connect the outer ring to the center. That’s why we made a little card covered with relays! Use the 16 red and black wires you’ve cut and prepared and solder the red ones to the inner part of the buttons, the black ones to the outer ring of the buttons. My advice? Prepare the buttons prior to soldering the wires to them with a drop of tin. Cut the stripped wires extremely short to avoid the cables touching both the center and the outer ring. Do that for the 8 buttons on the board. Solder the two remaining wires to the ex-battery sockets. On the following pictures I have protected the wires/buttons with some Bondic UV glue

  • Breathe a little, take a break, do whatever you need, the next step is long and boring… All those wires now need to go to the relay board we made earlier… The relays center pin (3 and 5) are the coil pins, we are going to connect the buttons to the contact pins, 1 and 7. Polarity doesn’t matter here. First, I have numbered our buttons. This numbering will follow us to the end, as it is also used later when programming. Note that “10” is the button behind the card, the reset button. Also note that the image is an untouched Velux board, yours surely looks more like a messy hairy monster with red and black hairs.

  • The numbers beside the relays on the next scheme represent the button numbers. Solder the red and black wires accordingly (black wires are drawn blue on scheme). Relay P pin 7 gets the red wire going to the Velux board top ex battery socket. Hole at 1,38 gets the black wire going to the Velux board bottom ex battery socket.

  • Cut some double-sided tape of the same length as your relay board, glue it on the relay board, and glue the whole on the Velux board back!

  • Take a break, breathe again, we’re through the hardware modifications.

  • Let’s connect to the raspberry!

    • Connect the red wire from 3,7 to #4 (DC Power 5v)
    • Connect the black wire from 1,40 to #6 (Ground)
    • Connect the black wire from 7,40 to #34 (Ground)
    • Connect relay 10 (5,40) to GPIO #40 (GPIO21)
    • Connect relay 9 (5,36) to GPIO #37 (GPIO26)
    • Connect relay 8 (5,32) to GPIO #38 (GPIO20)
    • Connect relay 7 (5,28) to GPIO #35 (GPIO19)
    • Connect relay 5 (5,24) to GPIO #36 (GPIO16)
    • Connect relay 1 (5,20) to GPIO #33 (GPIO13)
    • Connect relay 2 (5,16) to GPIO #32 (GPIO12)
    • Connect relay 3 (5,12) to GPIO #31 (GPIO06)
    • Connect relay P (5,7) to GPIO #26 (GPIO07)
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