I am experimenting with an app that can set the turn and extend positions of a Vogel’s Motionmount TV mount (Probably is Next 7355, I’ve had it for a couple f years). Currently, I can manually set the turn and extend positions from within the Homey GUI. I have a “then” flow “Goto position” that can set the turn and extend position from within a flow. I broke this with recent modifications, but that’s an easy fix most likely.
I am working on getting the presets in the app, which seems to be possible, but requires some more work and testing.
I have no experience with creating Homey apps, and have not looked at publishing. There also seems to be a difference in creating apps for old and new Homey Pro’s which I have not looked at. I may do that, but only if there are people who have such a MotionMount device and very much want an app to control it. Let me know!
I have published alpha release 0.0.3 of my app. This is the proof of concept, now including the possibility to set the MotionMount to one of the saved presets. I have done some happy flow testing, and it seems to work. Keep an eye on your device while testing! Also, note that your Homey has to be able to setup a stable bluetooth connection to your Motionmount. I had to move my Homey in range for this. The initial setup may fail if no BLE connection can be made when adding the device. I am working on getting that connection more robust.
The app has been tested by one person other than me, and it was reported that it works. If you do also test, please let me know!
I also have a motion mount next 7356 (for OLED screen), I have installed the app, but when I search voor motion mounter to add the mount, I don’t find anything.
So the app searches for a Bluetooth device with the exact name “Vogel’s MotionMount”. Did you rename your device, or does it have a different name by default?
I have been testing with an option to have a flow card like “when position changed”, but I could not get that to function the way I liked. Also, it either requires a constant BT connection to the device, or a polling of the device and use that poll data to trigger the flow card. The first option makes it that the default Vogel’s app cannot connect, which is really undesirable. The second option causes a significant delay between the changing of the position and the triggering of the card. A poll connects via BT, which at that moment makes other BT connections to the device impossible. So very frequent polls are bad. I might revisit it. But I also wonder how one would use such a flow.
Anyway, I removed that particular flow code, had Claude fix some stuff to make it more robust, changed the way that manual preset selection works (it doesn’t detect presets, you just have to pick one now), enabled polling by default (else the sliders and position numbers are not accurate), and set the polling default to five minutes and the minimum to 60 seconds. Still seems to work pretty well here.
I changed the name, but I changed it back to the default name, and now I can add him to my homey, but when I want to control him, nothing happens, I also can’t see the presets I have made in de Vogel’s app or when i want to control the motionmount through the app nothing happens.
"Hi Thund3rstone, I’m testing v0.1 with a NEXT 7356 (you and the other testers were probably on the 7355). Adding it only worked after I set the mount back to its exact default name ‘Vogel’s MotionMount’ — small tip: the name filter is quite strict right now.
After adding, the app connects (the reconnect error disappeared), and both the turn and extend setpoints follow the sliders correctly. But the mount doesn’t move, and the read-back positions both stay empty (no position updates at all). This applies equally to turning and extending, so it doesn’t look like a preset or direction issue but rather a difference in the GATT characteristics between the 7355 and the 7356.
I’d be happy to help: shall I send an nRF Connect dump of the services/characteristics (UUIDs, with read/write/notify) of my 7356 so you can compare them against your 7355? Let me know which format is most convenient for you."
So the name filter is something that is not really appropriate for finding motion mounts. Will have to see if there’s a better way. I think I searched for a device that advertised a specific service in an early build of the app. But that probably would also have been restricted to the 7355.
Anyway, I can look at an nrf dump for sure, but don’t know if that will be enough to figure everything out. The way I found the services/characteristics was to compare two dumps after changing the device position, and trying to put values in writable services and see if the mount would change position. If I look at the current nrf connect data on my iPad, it is easy to see the turn and extend position services. App layout seems to have changed, they are the first two services that have read, write and notify. The move is at the Botton of the output, second-to-last with only write.
So maybe it is possible to figure out how to control th 7356 with a dump indeed. I can give that a try.
