Building a house and smart blinds

[Ryan780]

You should check out a few different threads. I have all of the blinds in my house now through SmartThings and each was less than $30. A lot of the projects require you to get something 3d printed so I figured I was out of luck. There are services out there to print for you but the shipping is so high it made it cost-prohibitive. I was able to find a site called 3D Hubs. They list people local to you who print for people and the site manages all the payments so you’re not writing a check or sending credit card info to a stranger. Then once they are printed, you arrange for local pickup. My local hub guy runs a CNC business out of his garage, so I just picked them up at his house. Got a TON of stuff printed with him super cheap.

[RELEASE] ESP8266 / Arduino servo controlled smart blinds

Here we go! This is a re-think of the simple smart blinds created by @C_Hobbs. The code now supports positioning the blinds, not just open and close. You can also add a switch to the blinds for those times that you just want to move them a bit manually. I used a custom designed gear box I printed on my 3d printer to connect the servo to the shaft that controls the window blind angle. This is my first SmartThings project. I will clean up this first post as time allows and I get some pictures taken. For the servo I used a $4 TowerPro clone from AliExpress model MG996. I found that the D1 Mini WeMos board fit easier in the window blind header than the NodeMCU. Both should work. The largest window I have in my house is a picture window that is about 6’ and this setup works for that. Any sma…

Battery Powered Solar Recharged Automated Blinds

I’ve been working on this project for around 9 months now and I finally have a satisfactory solution. I was inspired by @jetpuf’s implimentation using the ESP8266. My solution had to be a bit more creative in order to have low enough power consumption to run on batteries and allow for solar recharging (with a small and discrete solar panel). My solution was to add a central ‘hub’ which is always connected to WiFi which can communicate with the blinds. The blinds are generally ‘sleeping’ and only awake when they receive a command from the hub (over 915Mhz RF). The Hub consists of a WeMos D1 Mini with a RF shield (using RFM69W) and the blind controller uses a Moteino from lowpowerlab.com which also has a RFM69W. The moteino is seated in a custom circuit board that I created which handles th…

And if you’re locking to modify either of those for vertical blinds, I did that too…this worked out so much better than I hoped. Hit perfectly on the first try.

Automated Vertical Blinds by ryan780