The lake place has 18 motorized Somfy shades, and I wanted them in Home Assistant — Good Night closes the blackouts, Good Morning opens them, nobody fumbles for an app on vacation. This should have been the easy kind 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.” Which was strange, because the hardware was very much sitting on the wall using exactly that platform, and the official Somfy app logged in with the same credentials just fine.
Right password, wrong door
The answer, confirmed by an open Home Assistant GitHub issue full of people in the same boat: Somfy had quietly merged their account systems, and the unified login now resolves to their alarm-and-camera side of the house instead of the shade-control side. Right password, right hardware, wrong door — and nothing on my end could fix it, because the mismatch lives entirely in their account plumbing.
Seven taps on the PIN
So, the back door. The TaHoma hub has a local API — it just ships disabled and undocumented. To enable it, you open the hub’s info screen in the Somfy app and tap the PIN number seven times. Not a settings toggle. Not a menu. Seven taps on a number that gives no indication it’s a button, like a cheat code, at which point a Developer Mode menu simply appears.
From there you generate an access token, and I’ll flag the gotcha that cost me a round of 401 errors: the app displays the token truncated to about twenty characters, and if you transcribe what you see, you’ve copied a stub. Use the copy button. The real token is longer than the box it’s shown in.
The hub among the smart TVs
One more small detective moment: five different devices on that network answer on the same HTTPS port, so to figure out which one was actually the hub, I read each one’s TLS certificate until I found the one signed by Overkiz. The hub was hiding among the smart TVs.
After that, Home Assistant’s Overkiz integration pointed at the hub in local mode picked up all 18 shades — each room has a pair, one blackout and one sheer — and the scenes just work. Five of them came over as anonymous Zigbee entities the hub never bothered to name, so there’s a pending afternoon of opening them one at a time and yelling “that one’s the dining room” across the house. Automation is glamorous work.
The workaround beat the front door
The punchline is that the workaround beat the front door. The official path would have routed every “close the blinds” through Somfy’s cloud; the seven-tap path keeps all of it on the local network, works when the internet doesn’t, and sends nothing anywhere. I wouldn’t have chosen local-only on day one. I’d choose it now.