How to restore a SOMA Connect without having to re-pair everything

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In my bedroom I have some SOMA smart shades and a SOMA Connect to control them from HomeKit. This setup works pretty well, except every now and then the SOMA Connect will stop working entirely; being a Raspberry Pi it’s easy enough to hook up to a monitor and see that it’s kernel panicking on startup.

I suspect there’s an automatic update mechanism that simply doesn’t work right.

Anyway, when this happens, the fix is to just reflash the MicroSD card… but this also wipes out all your settings, and in HomeKit that means having to set everything up again, including scenes and automations. Very annoying.

But, if you have a Linux machine (or a Linux VM) it’s possible to save the setting files for later.

  1. Mount the MicroSD on a Linux machine
  2. Open the rootfs partition
  3. Copy the contents of var/soma-connect/ somewhere safe; there should be three JSON files (at least, that’s what was on mine)
  4. Reflash the MicroSD normally
  5. Remount the MicroSD and copy those JSON files back into the now-empty rootfs/var/soma-connect/ directory (you might have to do this as an administrator)

If all goes well, the device should come back online and HomeKit should see them as the exact same bridge and accessories as before.