I’m currently putting together a system that will get about a year+ of battery life from a 2000mAh battery (without any movement) and has solar recharging. In my testing so far it only takes a few hours of direct sunlight to fully charge the battery after a week or so of use (and a week of cloudy days). My system is a bit more complicated though, the blinds are all RF controlled and communicate with a base-station which is a WeMos D1 Mini with a RF shield on it. Once I have everything working the way I want I’ll put together a post.
Thanks! I’ll be interested to see more. Which solar panel are you planning to use if you don’t mind me asking?
I’m currently using 3 250mA 5v panels strung together in my own 3D printed case. It’s a bit overkill so I’m probably going to drop it down to 1 or 2 panels per shade.
I’m interested to see what you are putting together. My wife would love for me to remove the cords from the windows… although she does like the automatic blinds 
Thanks for this code! I struggled to get the WiFi to come up and get an IP from my DHCP server so I used the example code for WiFiMulti and the WiFiMulti module from the Arduino IDE and it works great. I used cheap blinds from Home Depot and they come in a variety of sizes. I created an adapter that you can print for these here http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2320388.
I am powering the servo directly from the board using the GND and Vin pins, no need to split the USB cable.
I have been trying to get the power draw down for the NodeMCU so that I can run it off the 5000mAh battery mentioned in this thread but have not had much luck. I can get at most 3 or 4 days. I have removed the power to the USB UART. Still no luck.
More info and pics of this project here http://blog.assome.com/2017/05/automated-blinds-with-smartthings-and.html
How to cut the power to the USB UART and some other ideas to reduce power consumption from Malcolm Yeoman in his blog post here https://tinker.yeoman.com.au/2016/05/29/running-nodemcu-on-a-battery-esp8266-low-power-consumption-revisited/
I have done a few more tests and am ready to conclude that solar power may not work for me, at least not with the combined battery/solar panel combo. I rewrote a lot of the code and added OTA updates (since the device requires a ladder to install) and a sleep mode that would last for 8 hours. The thinking behind it was to sleep the device after sunset when there would be no need to re-open the blinds. I used a CoRE routine to close the blinds and set a sleep switch in the device handler. This passed a new command to the NodeMCU of ‘sleep’ in addition to the existing ‘close’ and ‘open’ commands.
The issue here is that the battery turns off for anything below 50mA so if you sleep you cannot wake up and if you reduce power consumption by removing power to the USB UART you get random shutoffs the power draw drops below 50mA.
NodeMCU with original code posted here ~ 80mA
NodeMCU with refactored wifi code in STA mode ~ 70mA
Wemo D1 with refactored wifi code in STA mode ~ 70mA
NodeMCU with refactored wifi code in STA mode and USB UART disabled ~ 50mA
@C_Hobbs just wanted to thank you for this release! I followed your instructions to the “T” and had no issues other than my own mistakes. So, again…thank you!
This is a awesome. I am likely going to try to pursue this using the NodeMCU. Do you suggest using V1, V2, V3? Or does it matter?
I know that the point of this project was to keep things as simple as possible. However, I think it would be an awesome addition to be able to set preferences for which way the blinds for preferences. This will of course change based on the time of the year. Here’s a good article on how to put the slats:
Hello Folks … this is great project!.
I am also trying to setup the same however, I am not sure how Alexa will recognize my blinds? When I ask Alexa to discover devices … it cannot find the blinds… This is what I did
1 - Flash the chip ESP8266-12E with the code (my ssid and password)
2 - Connect the servo
Chip is able to make connect to wifi… I can see the IP… and also, I can open and close the servo(blinds) form ESPWebsever from the browser …
IP/open
IP/close
However, I am not sure how can I control this with Alexa. I have been struggling this with last 15 hrs … no luck … 
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!
You have to create a DTH for smartthings and then add the switch it creates to your Alexa smartapp.
Ben, Thanks!
aahhh … I guess I missed a very important point here. I need to have a hub to get this thing working with Alexa. Is that right?
You need to have SmartThings set up to talk to the blinds. Alexa won’t talk to them directly.
Got it. Thanks!
I can control my blinds using this from Alexa using “turn on /turn off”, but is there a way to make “open /close the blinds” work?
Hey everyone, I was a long time SmartThings user and still use the hub lightly. I cutover most of my setup to homeassistant and had created this project. Take a look, it uses mqtt, but mqtt with homeassistant is dead simple and rock solid.
1 Like
nice project but really would need it to be battery/solar charged. some windows i dont have access to power outlet close by, would make it difficult for installation.
1 Like
Wifi applications will not work with solar, unless there is some wifi low energy that I am unaware of. The power draw for wifi chips is too great. You may be able to adapt a z-wave chip to interact with a motor, and that could run off of solar, but wifi is out of the picture.
I’m working on this exact project. I almost have it done but am having some lingering issues. My project requires a base station that has Wifi and RF and then arduino based controllers in the blinds which use RF. You send a command over wifi to the hub which then relays the command via RF to the blinds.