Connecting motorised curtain rails to home automation system

[dnb]

In a fit of hopefulness about finishing my build (or insanity, I'm not sure...) I bought a couple of Acrimo motorised curtain tracks in a Black Friday sale so I could evaluate them.

 

For the price I am quite impressed - the whole thing cost not much more than a similar length manual pull cord rail. The curtain rails themselves are designed nicely and implemented well. The battery built in to the motor and supplied small solar panel and is a nice feature to avoid running power (I already have power there, so that was a waste of wire...). The instructions however are less good unless you understand Spanish because the translation to English has some comedy moments. That said, the product doesn't really need too many instructions because the basic set up is fairly intuituve.

 

Of course motorised curtains are silly unless they are automatically controlled somehow. The instructions claim the motors have two RS485 connections via a RJ45 connector, but then don't explain much more about these. The RJ45 connector also has some logical connections to trigger opening and closing. I could use a micro controller connected to Ethernet (Pi Pico or similar since these are cheap enough) to operate the curtains according to the home automation system's commands but it would be fewer components and therefore better if I could work out how the RS485 bus works. I am waiting for a couple of USB RS485 interfaces to arrive in the post, but in the mean time does anyone have experience of these motors?