How to motorize vertical blinds

Wiki Ideas and Suggestions
1

Hey guys,
I see there is a lot of information on how to build motorized roller shades and horizontal blinds, but does anyone have experience motorizing vertical blinds? Is there anywhere that has a tutorial or maybe sells a kit?
Thanks,
Yining

2

Tagging @keithcroshaw.

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Wow, you are erielie in my head @Comolongo. I was just working on this right now. Using this setup here:

I sucessfully got all 3 sets of horizontal blinds working in my house. I am working on modifying the housing and gear to fit my vertical blinds. Here’s a pic of what I’ve got so far.
09-19-17-39
The problem I’m running into is that the gear that allows for wand rotation also acts like a brake. Rotating the control rod without rotating the wand just doesn’t work. So, I took my blinda apart today and figured out how to get that control off and added another rod to the first blind in the set. That is all ready, now I’m just waiting to get my printing done to see if the control housing and gear work on my vertical blinds.

I’ve looked at things like EZWand and SmartWand but both are VERY expensive (Smart Wand is $140 for everything) plus, I’m not sure about integration with ST. EZWand looks like it might but the remote only moves them. There’s no memory in the wand itself to command to go to this spot. So, integration with ST would be VERY VERY difficult I think. This way, if it doesn’t work, all i’m out is the $10 servo and $10 for the 3d printing from 3d Hubs. If anyone has a better idea, I’m all ears.

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4

Here’s my project:

Particle as mentioned above is releasing a new mesh platform this summer that I’d love to redo my blinds with.

There’s a product that is on indegogo that I’ve tested called iBlinds. It won’t be delivered until October though. Also there MySmartBlinds that I think is available now, looks pretty similar to iBlinds but uses Bluetooth, not sure how that would work with ST…

PM me for more help if you need it or if you think someone else could benefit from our conversation post your follow up questions here. Good luck!

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Finally got my project completed. It worked out perfectly on the first printing.

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