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

Hi Ben: Electrical part is not a big issue. The biggest challenge is to manage and apply enough torque to rotate the blind with appropriate motion in a small space. Any suggestion/advise from you?

I’m using a gear box and a MG946R, for larger blinds I need two sets of servos. Gives me about 120 degrees of motion.

Thanks Ben. Do you have any specific model for the gearbox and motor? I have very difficulties to manage enough torque to rotate the horizontal blinds. Any help will be appreciated.

The gearbox was designed specifically for Home Depot faux wood blinds:

You may have to modify this one to make it work.

Many thanks

I finally got around to making a writeup for my design:

you are zeeeeeeeee man! many thanks for reaching out. but not sure if i can follow this based on the difficulty of getting parts and 3d printing etc. but a good start.

THANK YOU! This worked like a charm. I have bay windows so I needed to do 3 of these. I ordered the 3d printed part as well. Right now I have the servo attached with double sided tape, and I’m searching for the right size block of wood to put under it. Currently I just have a 9volt battery supporting it, which seems to be the perfect size… But I don’t want a 9v battery just hanging out in my blinds.

I’m looking into controlling ALL 3 servos with only one NodeMCU. Has anyone experimented with this? I know there may be power issues…

Any ideas on how to adapt this for a roller blind? In the UK very limited options and the few that are around are very expensive.

If the gearbox is just winding the strings then it’s a question of torque.

I’m also in the UK, and I’m planning on heading down the “buy a cheap tubular motor” route. I’ve already got a ESP board hooked up to an RF transmitter, so I’ll probably just find an RF one and sniff it.

Something like this should work, although it’s going to be a post-new year project.

Will be interested to see how you get on.

I just want to thank you guys for all your efforts and contributions. I’ve used the information posted here and a few other posts and have successfully tested a set of blinds. I have a few questions before I can finish this project though. First regarding getting power to each NodeMCU/servo combo. I have two areas with 3 windows and one outlet and was thinking of purchasing this 4 usb port outlet, but I really want to avoid running a 6/10/20 usb cords across my window frames. Any suggestions? Also I have three 60" blinds and was wondering if the SG5010 servo can handle the job. I’m only using this to open and close the blinds not raise or lower. Thanks for the help.

I’m using tubular motors from Ebay (try ‘Bofu’) controlled with a Broadlink RMPro.
Got them working on Ikea blackout blinds by 3d printing some collars to fit the diameter of the ikea tubes.
Was great in the summer to get woken up by the sunlight when the blinds opened, now in winter it’s darker outside than in!

Yes that’s the type I’m using.

Would like to know this too, as I’m unsure how to run three servos.

I haven’t had much time to be playing around with this project but… if anyone and figure out the code to pump out 3 servos on the node I am sure I could use an few SCR’s and a little tinkering and get it to work.

You just need to give each servo a PWM pin and create a section of code to handle each blind. Should be fairly simple to do.

Thanks Ben again for your wisdom. My problem is how I modify the smartthings app to allow more then one blind on the same ip the code on the Arduino should be the easy part.

You can do it two ways, you can either create a composite device with all three blinds in one and then associate virtual switches to each blind within the composite device or you can create a Parent/Child device to handle the hubAction calls. You can check out my blinds project for an example of that type of SmartApp/DeviceType combo.