I just want to share that these are by far the best home automation you can have. I love my smart lights, hacked together smart humidifier, smart fans (the vornado dc fans with outlet switches), intake air pump, and air quality monitoring.
But nothing has the quality of life impact of smart blinds. It’s the best, and probably only, way to reliably keep your sleep schedule in sync. Smart lightbulbs - four of the brightest you can buy - are nothing compared to a window on a cloudy day.
seanalltogether · 1h ago
Automated blinds can also have a good effect on temperature control. In the summer you can have your south facing blinds automatically close when you leave the house to block out the sun.
threatofrain · 1h ago
Could we hear more about your home automation stack? I'm looking to get into this myself.
joshvm · 55m ago
Can't speak for OP, but just get Home Assistant running and play around. It'll work in Docker in anything, but it's a good use for an old Raspberry Pi. There isn't much more of a stack than that, and HA is by far the most polished OSS solution.
It's got some sharp edges - every time I've done a major auto-update it's broken something critical. You can run it alongside other controllers like the Hue Bridge, which is nice to have as a backup (since 90% of what most people connect is smart lighting). Probably the most useful simple automation I have is an motion activated dim light in the bathroom at night, but that's using Hue.
Then look at ESPHome, which is an ecosystem for making your own DIY sensors and controllers that can feed into HA. For example we have a Sensirion air quality sensor that triggers a smart switch connected to a fan if the particulate level gets high when cooking. You can go a very long way with on/off to control non-smart devices, and your sensors don't need to be particularly accurate (like absolute PM2.5) as long as the conditon you trigger on is repeatable.
The only thing to think about is what hardware ecosystem makes sense for you. For example there's at least four different competing standards for connectivity (WiFi, Zigbee, Z-Wave, Matter/Thread, etc). So getting a Zigbee dongle isn't a bad idea because then you can connect any IKEA or Hue device (among others).
AnotherGoodName · 2h ago
Fwiw automated blinds in the bedroom are a 100% no brainer benefit. It's wonderful and better than an alarm clock with 0 mental load (set the times to open close across the week once and then never think about them again, you can keep the weekend manual if you like).
As in a lot of home automation actually makes things worse. Replacing a convenient light switch with an app? 100% terrible idea and actually makes things inconvenient, don't automate those.
But the blinds, specifically those in your bedroom? Do it! One of those life hacks that's really not that expensive and makes your life better with 0 cognitive load after initial setup.
cortesoft · 14m ago
My blinds don’t work as an alarm clock for me at all. I sleep with a pillow over my eyes, no amount of light is going to wake me up.
sgt · 46s ago
That'll just make it too easy for an assassin.
dzhiurgis · 24m ago
You are making assumption I want to wake up that early.
Quite opposite - I’m searching for way to completely black out the room since kids will wake up with slightest shred of light, far before daycare starts. And I’m not even living if far lats.
But yeah I still want them for convenience. Problem is I don’t want cables dangling around curtains and battery options are limited.
Etheryte · 13m ago
This comment makes no sense. You choose when you want your automated blinds to open, if you don't want to wake up early, just don't set them to open early?
asimpletune · 1h ago
Does anyone know if something like this already exists for the heavy duty, built-in shutters they have in Italy? The kind that close and form a barrier over the window and are operated with a flat roll of fabric from inside.
patrickk · 49m ago
They also have them in Germany. I used to have the manual "flat roll of fabric" in the past, and upgraded the entire rollers in the house to electric ones (I don't know if it's possible to only upgrade the fabric roll -> electric switch without upgrading the entire shutter).
After you have electric-controlled rollers, you can control them via any automation you want by installing a "Shelly Plus 2PM" device behind each switch.
I connect the Shellys to home assistant, and from there, trigger all the rollers to go down a certain number of minutes after sunset. They all rise at a certain time in the morning. You can always trigger them manually too, of course. ChatGPT can spit out very complex YAML for HA if you want to make life easier, your only limit is your imagination.
lultimouomo · 27m ago
Yes, the keyword you are looking for is "tapparella motorizzata".
notpushkin · 1h ago
I’ve seen those somewhere in the Southeast Asia so I think I’ve got what you’re saying. The challenge would be to replace the stopper you currently have (because it’s hard to work around it with a motor) and replace it with something you can activate electrically.
allenrb · 2h ago
Would measuring motor current be a better way to determine torque? Not an expert but seems like you could sense voltage across a fairly small shunt to do it.
cpgxiii · 2h ago
Motor current is a workable, but generally unsatisfactory, proxy for torque when using heavily geared motors. Far better to measure output torque directly if you can, which is what's being done here using what is essentially a series elastic mechanism (itself a very common way of implementing torque sensing).
To elaborate more, current sensing is only "better" in an ease-of-implementation sense, in that a lot of motor drivers already have current sensing built in/easily added. For some applications this is good-enough, but in terms of estimating "real number" torque from current, it can take a lot of work to characterize for geared motors.
buescher · 2h ago
Motor current is an excellent way to measure torque and is what is done in real-world settings all the time. As a hobbyist you might have to settle for relative torque if you aren't in a position to characterize a motor or you don't have manufacturer's data for it.
cpgxiii · 1h ago
I wouldn't say excellent. Motor current->torque is well correlated for motors in isolation, or with very low gear ratio. Not so with higher gear ratios. Can the current value be used to make control decisions for the motor? Yes. Does the current give you torque in Nm? No.
In the robotics world this is sometimes distinguished between actuators that report "effort" (i.e. a current-derived estimate) and actuators that report torque (i.e. actual torque sensing or direct-drive with current sensing). Both can be useful, but "effort" is not torque.
buescher · 1h ago
Current will never directly give you torque in Nm which is a straw man argument - you will always have to know the motor constant, input voltage, coil resistance, and gear ratio to back out torque. That's characterizing the motor. Yeah, that's a lot of work for a hobbyist, but it's not at all unreasonable to consider a motor an excellent torque transducer - that's what it does.
cpgxiii · 1h ago
If the current->torque behavior of motors with gearboxes could be generally well characterized, the entire distinct market sector of "cobots" would not exist because every industrial robotics vendor would have long had good torque modelling on their actuators.
As it stands, Universal Robots (and likely their clones) do use current->torque characterization for their actuators (which, amusingly, is then stored on a robot-specific USB drive or SD card), and their torque sensing is shit. Shit enough that for any useful force/torque application you still need a separate force/torque sensor. Schunk, for some of their electric parallel grippers with "force" feedback, only characterizes them at a single velocity and there is significant error in the force estimate at any other speed. Good current->torque characterization of a complete actuator is so difficult that approximately no vendors in the automation space are willing to do it.
01100011 · 2h ago
That's how we did it when I worked on a gate-arm/access control system. I'd monitor current and if a spike occurred I'd back the arm up because it likely hit something.
neilv · 2h ago
What are the child safety considerations to be careful of, with blinds, and with openers?
(I recall seeing warning stickers and design changes on ordinary miniblinds. I suspect that one of the changes involved having multiple pull cords be separate and loose, rather than a fastened together or a single looped cord. But I'd guess that's not the only safety design decision.)
buescher · 2h ago
UL 325 covers them and can be read (but not printed or saved) on UL’s website if you register. More dangerous than you might think though the real horror stories are with stage curtains. PSA for hacker news: Safety is the product of a process, not a feature, and standards are written in blood. You don’t get there by surmising, no matter how skilled, clever, or well-intentioned you are.
notpushkin · 1h ago
It totally can be saved if you try hard enough (and are not afraid of a pretty scary legal warning in the free view feature).
If the UL devs read this: if you want to cut your AWS bill, perhaps don’t send the images as BMP?
AStonesThrow · 2h ago
What are the safety considerations of smart blinds opening up a bedroom at inopportune moments, such as children playing outside while you're having sex or changing clothes?
Is there a lockout mode for "I/we are not decent" or do the blinds just sort of majestically reveal the bedroom to your backyard/parking lot observers like curtains opening on a feature film?
madaxe_again · 2h ago
I think the principle two things are “they can’t pull it off the wall and onto themselves” and “they can’t hang themselves”.
With automatic openers you add “they can’t get snarled up/lose a finger in the mechanism” and “they can’t electrocute themselves”.
I went extremely belt and braces with our blind opener - but it is toddler proof. Attached the lower end of the cord to the ceiling, attached a pulley that hangs on the cord, hung a 1kg weight from it, and used a solenoid from a broken linktap valve to pull a pin that allows the weight to fall and pull the cord.
Even with the blinds open the whole assemblage is entirely out of her reach, and it goes for the opposite effect to the poster’s implementation - blinds slam open in about half a second with a quiet whirr, as I prefer a jarring wakeup, and my wife would sleep through Armageddon. Reset is manual, but that’s fine, closing them is an optional and trivial activity.
TheKnack · 1h ago
I have these on all of my blinds and they are amazing. You can sometimes get them on sale for $50-60 each. They come with a solar panel that keeps them charged. You can add a hub that makes them work with HomeKit.
Funny I used that white magnetic encoder and now I see it everywhere
vanschelven · 34m ago
I wondered what an "homebrew automated" was and by which mechanism it could blind the person who opened it...
ThrowawayTestr · 23m ago
I love the choice of enclose.
tayo42 · 41m ago
I need to figure something like this out. My bedroom has this arch window about 3-4ft wide that's over 10ft high that I've permanently blacked out so I can sleep in. I'd love an easy way to open it and get light in the day though.
xyst · 1h ago
Person just wanted to automate a few "dumb" appliances but ended up building his own system (software and hardware) to do this.
I wish I had time to bike shed like this. Just learning, tinkering, and enjoying life.
But nothing has the quality of life impact of smart blinds. It’s the best, and probably only, way to reliably keep your sleep schedule in sync. Smart lightbulbs - four of the brightest you can buy - are nothing compared to a window on a cloudy day.
It's got some sharp edges - every time I've done a major auto-update it's broken something critical. You can run it alongside other controllers like the Hue Bridge, which is nice to have as a backup (since 90% of what most people connect is smart lighting). Probably the most useful simple automation I have is an motion activated dim light in the bathroom at night, but that's using Hue.
Then look at ESPHome, which is an ecosystem for making your own DIY sensors and controllers that can feed into HA. For example we have a Sensirion air quality sensor that triggers a smart switch connected to a fan if the particulate level gets high when cooking. You can go a very long way with on/off to control non-smart devices, and your sensors don't need to be particularly accurate (like absolute PM2.5) as long as the conditon you trigger on is repeatable.
The only thing to think about is what hardware ecosystem makes sense for you. For example there's at least four different competing standards for connectivity (WiFi, Zigbee, Z-Wave, Matter/Thread, etc). So getting a Zigbee dongle isn't a bad idea because then you can connect any IKEA or Hue device (among others).
As in a lot of home automation actually makes things worse. Replacing a convenient light switch with an app? 100% terrible idea and actually makes things inconvenient, don't automate those.
But the blinds, specifically those in your bedroom? Do it! One of those life hacks that's really not that expensive and makes your life better with 0 cognitive load after initial setup.
Quite opposite - I’m searching for way to completely black out the room since kids will wake up with slightest shred of light, far before daycare starts. And I’m not even living if far lats.
But yeah I still want them for convenience. Problem is I don’t want cables dangling around curtains and battery options are limited.
After you have electric-controlled rollers, you can control them via any automation you want by installing a "Shelly Plus 2PM" device behind each switch.
I connect the Shellys to home assistant, and from there, trigger all the rollers to go down a certain number of minutes after sunset. They all rise at a certain time in the morning. You can always trigger them manually too, of course. ChatGPT can spit out very complex YAML for HA if you want to make life easier, your only limit is your imagination.
To elaborate more, current sensing is only "better" in an ease-of-implementation sense, in that a lot of motor drivers already have current sensing built in/easily added. For some applications this is good-enough, but in terms of estimating "real number" torque from current, it can take a lot of work to characterize for geared motors.
In the robotics world this is sometimes distinguished between actuators that report "effort" (i.e. a current-derived estimate) and actuators that report torque (i.e. actual torque sensing or direct-drive with current sensing). Both can be useful, but "effort" is not torque.
As it stands, Universal Robots (and likely their clones) do use current->torque characterization for their actuators (which, amusingly, is then stored on a robot-specific USB drive or SD card), and their torque sensing is shit. Shit enough that for any useful force/torque application you still need a separate force/torque sensor. Schunk, for some of their electric parallel grippers with "force" feedback, only characterizes them at a single velocity and there is significant error in the force estimate at any other speed. Good current->torque characterization of a complete actuator is so difficult that approximately no vendors in the automation space are willing to do it.
(I recall seeing warning stickers and design changes on ordinary miniblinds. I suspect that one of the changes involved having multiple pull cords be separate and loose, rather than a fastened together or a single looped cord. But I'd guess that's not the only safety design decision.)
If the UL devs read this: if you want to cut your AWS bill, perhaps don’t send the images as BMP?
Is there a lockout mode for "I/we are not decent" or do the blinds just sort of majestically reveal the bedroom to your backyard/parking lot observers like curtains opening on a feature film?
With automatic openers you add “they can’t get snarled up/lose a finger in the mechanism” and “they can’t electrocute themselves”.
I went extremely belt and braces with our blind opener - but it is toddler proof. Attached the lower end of the cord to the ceiling, attached a pulley that hangs on the cord, hung a 1kg weight from it, and used a solenoid from a broken linktap valve to pull a pin that allows the weight to fall and pull the cord.
Even with the blinds open the whole assemblage is entirely out of her reach, and it goes for the opposite effect to the poster’s implementation - blinds slam open in about half a second with a quiet whirr, as I prefer a jarring wakeup, and my wife would sleep through Armageddon. Reset is manual, but that’s fine, closing them is an optional and trivial activity.
https://us.switch-bot.com/products/switchbot-blind-tilt
I wish I had time to bike shed like this. Just learning, tinkering, and enjoying life.
if Apple made window blinds...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hv6EMd8dlQk