I am sure that most of you have already noticed has been a new Loxone device introduced recently. It is a DIN rail mount Audio server, a replacement of the previous "Rack based" Music server. There is a lot of discussions happening about the features, design, and connectivity.

If you are using an iPad mounted somewhere to control your smart home, one important note to mention is that the new features for the audio server, and any further Loxone updates for iPad in general, do require iOS version 13.0 or greater.

I have been using iPad Air (A1474) for a good while already, but thanks to Apple such device cannot be updated to iOS 13. As a result, I won't be able to update Loxone's app on that iPad and enjoy any kind of new features they came with.

This is a pity especially if you have invested in some kind of permanent mount for the device.

After some initial inspection of the cabling i found out, that the 24V is coming normally into the Velux window frame, but not to the actual window. Also, I was almost sure that nothing will be wrong with the blind's drive itself, because of the symptoms mentioned above.

So I suspected that the cabling between the fixed window part and the moving roof window will be the root cause of the trouble. Quick look from the opened window to the right side where the cable bends with every window movement confirmed my theory about reason of this failure.

As you can see, the cable broke on two places. To fix this issue, I had to replace the cabling. This require complete removal of the blinds by:

1. Unscrewing the left and right aluminium rails and the bottom wheels holding the strings
2. Removing the rails
3. Snapping out the blind unit on both sides
4. Disconnecting the connector located on the right side

See this video for step by step instruction.

After that you need to remove both metal covers on the right hand side of the window. Each is fixed by one torx screw, which is also holding the plastic flexible support in the cable turn close to the window hinge. You do not need to fully remove those two parts, it is enough to lift these to be able to remove the plastic cable holder. Once you manage to remove the cable, replace it with a similar new one. The end connector can be either replaced or soldered back to the now cable.

The trickiest part is to properly place the cabling around the hinge. Take some pictures before removal, in case you have only one window. My room has three similar which gave me the guidance how to put the plastic piece back in position.

Then place back the blind unit, connecting the connector firs and clicking it in position. Next mount the rails back and finally the wheel with the strings to the bottom of the window. After that do some manual test before switching it on.

Now, I was replacing only one window, which is the one we open the most frequent. Quick inspection of the other two revealed the need for the rest to replace the cable as well. This is something on my plate for the future, but be aware that 5 years is close to the lifetime of the product, or at least its cable design that breaks at the hinge positions.

I hope this might help someone with the same problem.

Sounds simple, not an easy task though. I have started some research and landed on an interesting article summarizing why LIRC is not easily capable doing this. See here: http://blog.bschwind.com/2016/05/29/sending-infrared-commands-from-a-raspberry-pi-without-lirc/ (thanks Brian Schwind)

There are obviously other methods how to centrally manage home A/C like Modbus of KNX, but just the extension boards for such connection costs almost similar price as the external inverter unit. :(

I am going to explore this a bit more later and probably summarize my findings in an article here later on.

https://blog.rieke.tv/control-av-receiver-rs232-automatically-power-select-input-source/

Thanks a lot.

https://www.ozerov.de/fully-kiosk-browser/

I am testing this right now ad it seems to be able to serve what I was looking for which is switching between following views on a wall mounted tablet using remote http commands:

• RTSP stream from IP camera
• Smarthome app
• Web browser
• TTS (Text To Speech)

I will provide an update (hopefully) soon.

http://sarnau.info/inside_the_loxone_miniserver/

Nice site with a lot of other interesting post.

Kudos to Markus Fritze

https://hackaday.io/project/25817-upgrade-your-loxone-with-16a-ssr-outputs

My faulty card reported this:

http://sarnau.info/loxone-microsd-cards/

Kudos to Markus Fritze! 

I don't want to steal anyone else's ideas, but just for case the original posts dissapears, here is the custom two line script doing the trick. In the task scheduler (Control Panel / Task Scheduler) you create regular task with the following user-defined script pasted in the Run Command box:

wget -m ftp://<username>:<password>@<server_ip>/* -P /volume1/SecureBackups

tar -zcvf /volume1/SecureBackups/backup-$(date +%Y-%m-%d-%H-%M-%S).tar.gz /volume1/SecureBackups/<server_ip>/

What it does is that wget command mirrors the content of the FTP site (see documentation to wget here for more details) and stores these data to the directory listed after the -P parameter (locally at Synology storage). The beauty of this command is that with the next runs it only re-downloads the differences, so you don't need to transfer all the data over and over.

Then the next line creates compressed package of the whole structure downloaded, with date stamped filename. In my case, these are around 30MB for the whole miniserver structure compressed.

Please note that FTP is very old internet protocol and transfers plain username and password over the network. You should use this only on your local network, otherwise you're at risk of attacking your system by someone stealing these credentials. Also, your credentials are visible in the script in the Synology task details so please consider these factors when applying this solution.

However, this provides nice and simple solution how to schedule regular backup of the data from Loxone Miniserver to your local storage. Thanks a lot to Evotec for the idea.