ESP8266 Community Forum

I am a bit curious if anyone has built a electronic window shade. I was looking online for such devices the ones controlled with IR remotes are insanely expensive. From what I can gather it is a small amount of electronics to make this thing possible. A power supply, a relay, and a mcu with IR sensor and remote. (we can use an esp8266 instead of the last two items!!!!)

I am a bit curious it would be nice to close the shades with the push of a button or at a specific time but what the esp8266 can accomplish is doing so without the need for a chit ton of remotes laying everywhere and half of them somehow eaten up by your couch. Really no need for IR at all the esp could make everything controllable or on a schedule from your cellphone you could even set a series of actions to take place with the push of a single button now granted you may need a server to carry out all of the said actions but still.

I am curious if anyone has built their own electronic blinds and if so what hardware did they incorporate? type of motor relay power supply etc... How did they over come issues like the blind rolling up too far or the addition of weight to stop the unit from being creased or rolling up wrong etc.

It would be interesting to see.

What they want for a blind is practically highway robbery the materials and electronics for these things cost way less than the hundreds of dollars they want for these things! I would estimate one could build one relatively cheaper I would say somewhere in the realm of 40 to 80 dollars using an esp8266 and basic.

Hi, I have a bunch of these geared stepper motors sat on my desk for just that job (video), if I ever get round to printing a new insert for the ends of the blinds. They work well with an ESP8266-12, the input to the darlington driver was happy with 3.3V. As they are geared (64 / 1) I don't think they are likley to miss steps (64 x 64 = 4096 steps per revalotion of the output shaft), so was just going to run them as 1/2 micro stepping and count the steps for open / closed to avoid needing feedback (end stops), whilst storing the current postion in flash in case of power fails. They have quite a good torque, but at that price for bigger blinds you could use one at each end. They are quite slow, I think off hand it was 4 seconds per revalution, but how fast do you need your blinds to close?
It will be interesting to see what comes up though.

4 seconds per revolution hrmmm that would be 15rpms if they could handle the torque a fairly large roller would have it rolled up pretty quick I would assume how many inches per revolution? Maybe 4-6 how many inches is a typical curtain I think a minute could likely be the time for the full action to play out give or take a bit of time what is a lousy minute to roll down your curtains automatically truth is you will likely have spent the time taking care of a small errand like taking your shoes off it really only takes you approximately a couple of seconds which is way less than getting up going to fiddle with the mechanics of shades often you pull it too far down for the spring to release or for blinds wind up pulling the one side more than the other and it can run into a minute or more of your time from thought to completed action back to what you were doing.

So essentially what this does if give you some of your life back to waste on something else you see fit. Every five minutes of repetitive tasks through a day adds up to about 100 days over a persons life. on average. I don't know about you but this is my main argument for automation being smart rather than lazy. Not to mention it is interesting and innovative I think automation is the wave of the future. We are just kinda flirting with small beginnings in the whole scope of things. I see how peoples eyes light up when the actually see automation and how their opinion changes from lazy to hrmmm what a good idea when I let them use my very limited devices I can only imagine what the rest of the great minds of this world will come up with.

If you are talking about slat blinds , I would only automate the tilt of the slats , The only time we pull up the blinds is to
clean the windows.....

For roll up blinds a small geared motor [ OLD STK tape drive had many 28v geared motors]
You could then mount the shaft stationary, and let the motor [located inside and locked to the blind tube] rotate to raise and lower the blind. Twisting the wires on the motor could be a problem, but could be solved.