[OBSOLETE] Absolute Simplest ESP8266 Smart Blinds, no mqtt, rest, bridge, or broker, just your board and your hub

[C_Hobbs]

There never was a Smart App as this was designed to be as simple as possible and it simply wasn’t needed. All of the work is done by the Device Handler, sending signals directly to the Arduino.

As far as maintaining the code and implementing improvements, there honestly hasn’t been a need, I’ve been using this on some windows for these four years and it’s been rock solid.

This project did somewhat lead to a much more robust creation by @blebson with his genius use of moteinos that could be perpetually powered by solar panels.

Honestly, I would recommend his version to anyone going to DIY smart blinds on SmartThings today. I have a few windows that have been going for over 2 years with his version, purely solar powered, haven’t needed a battery change or manual charge, and with a daily open and close scheduled.

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…