A Minido installation by AnB S.A. is a wonderfully solid piece of Belgian home automation: wall switches, relay modules and an RS-485 bus that simply keeps working. The one thing it was never designed for is the modern smart home. hass4minido changes that. It is an open-source bridge that connects an existing Minido installation to Home Assistant, without touching a single wire.
No new modules. No rewiring. No proprietary app. Your bus stays exactly as it is, and every light, dimmer, shutter, button and ventilation unit shows up in Home Assistant as a normal, well-behaved entity.
Why this project exists
Minido predates the MQTT era. The original software stack was built for a different decade, and every attempt to modernise it ran into the same two hard truths about the bus:
- You cannot change a single output. Every command to a relay module must carry all eight channels at once.
- You cannot ask a module for its state. The only way to know which relays are on is to listen to the bus continuously and remember what you saw.
A modern bridge therefore has to be a careful listener first and a careful writer second. hass4minido was designed around that reality from day one, rather than bolted onto it.
What hass4minido gives you
- Native Home Assistant integration through MQTT Discovery. Nothing to install inside Home Assistant, no custom component.
- Every device type: relays, dimmers with brightness, roller shutters with position, buttons and temperature sensors.
- A safe restart story: the bridge never “flashes all lights on” after a reboot, a notorious failure mode of the old software.
- Configuration, not code: module kinds and device behaviour are declared over MQTT, so adapting the bridge to your home needs no rebuild.
- Logical devices: shutters and multi-speed ventilation units (VMC) are modelled properly, not as a pile of individual relays.
- Open source, GPL-3.0, Python 3, and small enough to audit.
Built for the awkward parts
Most home-automation integrations look fine until they meet a real installation. hass4minido was written against a live one, and it handles the parts that usually break.
Shutters that behave
A roller shutter is driven by a pair of relays. The bridge never reverses a motor directly: it always sends a STOP and pauses briefly before changing direction. Every movement is followed by an automatic STOP, so a motor is never left energised. Travel times and wiring polarity are per-shutter configuration, and the bridge estimates the opening percentage so you can ask for “50% open” from Home Assistant.
Ventilation with three speeds
A VMC ventilation unit is not one relay, it is three: a power relay and two speed relays, spread across the module. hass4minido treats it as a single logical device with off / low / medium / high, remembers the last speed across on-off cycles, and leaves the module’s remaining relays fully usable as normal switches.
Restart safety by design
Every output starts as unknown on boot. The bridge never replays old history as if it were live state, and it never acts on a module it has not observed. Explicit commands from you always work; autonomous actions only happen once the bridge is sure of the situation.
How it fits together
hass4minido is deliberately small and split into two services:
- a bridge that moves raw bus frames between the existing Minido adapter and MQTT;
- a core that maintains the authoritative state, translates Home Assistant actions into correct bus frames, and publishes every device through MQTT Discovery.
Everything travels over MQTT, in two clean layers: raw frames on one level, and semantic state and commands on the other. The result is a system you can inspect, script and monitor with standard tools, and deploy on Kubernetes next to Home Assistant.
Configuration, not guesswork
Real installations are never uniform. One module is a bank of relays, another drives shutters, a third has ventilation units wired across it. hass4minido lets you declare all of that over MQTT, and it keeps the address of every module canonical while the rest is configuration:
# declare a module as four shutters
hass4minido config set EXO07 kind=store
# tell the bridge how one shutter is wired and how it moves
hass4minido config set EXO07-store-1 inverted=true travel_up=23 travel_down=22
# group three relays into one logical ventilation unit
hass4minido config set VMC-etage plugin=vmc power=EXO09-3 speed2=EXO09-2 speed3=EXO09-1Change the configuration, restart the core, and Home Assistant picks up the new devices automatically. No recompiling, no wiring diagrams to redraw.
Where to find the code and the technical docs
The project lives on GitLab. The repository contains the full source, the protocol reference, a CLI, deployment manifests, and the architecture and restart-safety documentation:
https://gitlab.com/pivert/hass4minido
If you run a Minido installation and a Home Assistant instance, this is the missing link between a rock-solid 1990s bus and a 2020s dashboard. It is open, it is documented, and it was built on a real installation.