How to repair IKEA FYRTUR Smart blinds

I do have two IKEA FYRTUR Smart blinds, which I do like a lot. Unfortunately, after 6 years of service, one of them decided to stop working.

The way it happened was very innocent, one day, after pulling the blind up in the morning, it refused to roll down in the evening. At that moment, I thought that maybe it was just the battery, but after recharge nothing changed. That was the moment I’ve become suspicion, that something bad happened.

First step for saving

So what now?

In first place, there is no need to roll the blind by force to cover or uncover the window behind it. In my experience, it will not break anything if you do so, but you can easily lose your attachment to the wall, if you are not careful.

As first step, I do suggest detaching the blind from the wall. Attachments provided by Ikea are created for quick snap in/out attachment. So just take it down from the wall.

Now, when you look on the blind itself from the top, there are two screws in place where the frame is splitting into two. Just unscrew them, and it will slide to the side, which will release the cylinder with fabric. Now you can easily roll up the fabric, without need to apply force.

Second step, try to resurrect the motor and control board

I’ve read on Reddit from several people, that the main cause for blind to stop working was just loosen cable. If this is your case, you are lucky and should be able to fix it in just few minutes.

Another thing I can confirm is, that even when your motor is starting to fail, it is possible, that it will work again. I really suggest to check out this YT video and follow the steps in it. It does cover how to disassemble the blind and what to try to get it work.

Key step for me was plugging the motor directly into the battery. It somehow causes the motor to restart itself. After that, I was able to use my blind for few weeks, before it broke down again.

One thing to mention. In the video is said, that after plugging the battery in, the blind should try to retract itself. That is true, but I can confirm, that both of my blinds (only one was broken) are unsuccessful to do that when taken apart.

This can be some indicator of pre fail state, but you should not give up. In my case, after assembling everything together, it started to work again as expected. (It is possible that the motor expect some resistance).

Reassembling didn’t help, what now?

Next step should be finding out, what part is broken. You’ve already got some clues on this from the YT video. If motor is not spinning when connected to the battery directly, it is probably it.

There are 3 parts which can broke down:

Wireless board

If the blind is working right by hand (can be controller by buttons on it), but fails to follow wireless commands, than the Wireless board is faulty.

Great news is, that it is not needed for the blind to work, bad is that you have to touch it by hand anyway.

Your do have several options from there. You can replace it with Wi-Fi based board, which can be found there on GitHub mjuhanne/ikea-fyrtur .

Or, you can do it your own way. The motor board is communicating via UART, so you can use Arduino or RPi and create the remote board your self. How the communication works and which commands do what is greatly documented in this repository mjuhanne/fyrtur-motor-board , which contains custom firmware (but basic command are same for original).

Motor control board

It is tricky to find out if the motor is causing issues or its control board. To be honest, I do not know how to distinguish this two.

In my case, I’ve been lucky that I do have two of those blinds, so I just exchanged motor in them and waited for the next broke down.

If the blind fail after taking motor from another blind, then the control board is broken. If fails the other blind, then the motor itself is bad.

For motor control board, there is repository on GitHub daanvdl/fyrtur-motor-board-pcb which contains whole PCB recreated. You should be able to get manufactured new one with all this information.

Broken motor

This case is last one possible and a bit unfortunate. I was not able to find any replacement motor for those blinds. So, if your motor died, you will not be able to get your blind working again as it was originally.

But, I’ve come with my own solution for this case. And will cover it down bellow.

Replacement

It will work, you should not be worry, but it will be a bit more work.

I find this Zemismart ZM16B Zigbee Smart Roller Shade Blinds Motor . Thanks to it, we will be able to retain as much from the original blind as possible and be able to get it working.

But there are two problems to solve:

Original control gate

If you are still using the original Ikea control gate, which was needed for those blinds to control them via phone, you have to abandon it.

I’ve done this step a few months before one of the blinds broke down and was happy with it. You should use Home Assistant with some Zigbee Dongle (like SONOFF Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus E) instead.

The advantage is, that all the Ikea ecosystem will work (after setting everything up) the same, plus you can connect it with anything from other manufacturers.

There are tons of official guides how to do so like this official one on how to set up HA with RPi and this one for Zigbee setup.

ZHA Added support for this specific tubular motor few months ago, so setting everything up was much easier for me, then I initially thought. If you are unable to get it working, make sure your Home Assistant installation is up-to-date.

Make it physically compatible

The Zemismart tubular motor comes with several adapters for different kinds of blinds, but none of them is out of the box compatible with our FYRTUR Ikea blinds.

For that reason, I’ve designed adapters in FreeCAD, which can be 3D printed and used. Thanks to them, you should be able to fit the motor into the blind and use it as before.

As you can see, new motor fitted perfectly!

All the files for 3D print can found on Printables

And all source files (like FreeCAD projects) can be found on my Gitea .

Final words

I am using this setup for a few weeks and it works great. I am using original Ikea switch and second non modified blind, and it all works happily together.

One downside of this modification is, that the new motor do have much smaller battery than the original. It is caused by fitting the battery into the tube instead of the original, above placement.

I’ve decided to compensate that by purchasing the motor with solar panel. I am unable to give verdict if it works or not, because I am not using it long enough, but I can say, it is charging. I will see…