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$30 Homebrew Automated Blinds Opener (2024)

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Re: $30 Homebrew Automated Blinds Opener (2024)

#41

Post by ranger_danger »

Etheryte wrote: post #33
dzhiurgis wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

This comment also makes no sense... they said completely black out a room, which blinds alone cannot do.

Re: $30 Homebrew Automated Blinds Opener (2024)

#42

Post by Karliss »

buescher wrote: post #16
cpgxiii wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

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 .

The main keywords here are high gear ratio and cheap parts. I am not making universal claims about all use cases. For most sane designs, sure electric motors are great at converting energy into torque. Normally you would want most of the electric energy to be turned into useful work. Which implies that electric power directly correlates with mechanical power or torque*speed. The same can't always be said about gearboxes, especially for some of those targeted at hobby/toy use cases with crazy gear ratios like 1000:1 or higher. Gear ratio can be so high that you will strip the gears or make the shaft connection slip long before you can apply sufficient torque to slow down the dc motor which is almost free spinning and spending most of it's energy to overcome friction in first few gearbox stages instead of doing useful work. In a toy or hobby project when you want something to spin slowly it might not matter that the gearbox is It's not always question of lot of work for hobbyist, as it is result of using cheap of the shelf parts and modules which are optimized with different goal in mind and give very poor signal to noise ratio. Doesn't matter how much characterization you do if the change in temperature, grease viscosity and distribution, plastic flex produces higher variance in motor load than any force you can apply to final gearbox stage. I guess the more careful choice of suitable combination of parts from more specialized stores can be considered "lot of work for hobbyist" compared to picking first result on amazon or whatever you found in your junk bin so your argument still stands.

Of course high gear ratio or slow speed doesn't always mean inefficient gearboxes. There are solutions for slow rotation with or without high gear ratio which are reasonably efficient thus allowing to use motor current for estimating torque. And any serious or well designed equipment will use them. But that usually means more complex gearbox, motor controller or purpose built electric motors all of which is either more expensive or require high MOQ orders from manufacturers.

Re: $30 Homebrew Automated Blinds Opener (2024)

#43

Post by J_Shelby_J »

threatofrain wrote: post #19
J_Shelby_J wrote: post #8

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 brigh…

Could we hear more about your home automation stack? I'm looking to get into this myself.

The home assistant $100 stand alone device. Pretty seamless user experience. On par with what you would expect for a consumer device as far as UX. Maybe could be a bit more polished but you can do pretty much anything with it as far extending the ecosystem. My only complaint is that writing automations in untyped yaml sucks. Fortunately, if you dump the docs in an LLM it can one shot most things - if you’re trying to do something the gui automation tool doesn’t support.

The rest is zigbee and zwave switches and sensors. You can get cheap ones from ikea. You can get nicer ones from Zooz. I like Apollo for air quality sensors. The humidifier is the German brand Ventura. Zero maintenance. But it’s not smart so I got a power outlet that reports power usage. When it runs out of water the humidifier shuts off and the power goes to zero, so I have an automation that detects that and sends a message via the HA app.

Living in California and having fans move air around from cool rooms to warmer rooms has cut our AC bill significantly as a dc fan is a fraction of power consumption of a whole house AC. And also co2 levels stay much lower. Last week I set up my window fan to blow air in whenever it’s cooler outside then inside.

Re: $30 Homebrew Automated Blinds Opener (2024)

#44

Post by J_Shelby_J »

joshvm wrote: post #24
threatofrain wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could we hear more about your home automation stack? I'm looking to get into this myself.

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 n…

Same. I use the hue automations to handle the lights. HA is for everything else.

The hue motion sensors pay for themselves pretty quickly.

Re: $30 Homebrew Automated Blinds Opener (2024)

#45

Post by J_Shelby_J »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #30
AnotherGoodName wrote: post #7

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 thing…

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.

Batteries last more than a year and you can get ones with solar panels to recharge them.

Re: $30 Homebrew Automated Blinds Opener (2024)

#46

Post by foobarian »

J_Shelby_J wrote: post #8

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 brigh…

The blinds shown under this article are pretty ordinary vinyl type blinds that leak a ton of light. I wish I could find blinds thick enough to behave like cardboard over windows, that could also be opened on a daily cadence.

At this point I gave up on blinds and put a shirt over my eyes to sleep. I thought about just covering the windows permanently but I don't relish that idea.

Re: $30 Homebrew Automated Blinds Opener (2024)

#47

Post by Spivak »

seanalltogether wrote: post #20
J_Shelby_J wrote: post #8

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 brigh…

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.

So that's a funny thing, your blinds are on the inside of your house so the sun energy is hitting them and dissipating from there. Hopefully your blinds are white and reflecting more of it out than the other surfaces it would otherwise hit. But if you want to make a real temperature difference you need blinds on the other side of the insulated box otherwise known as an awning.

Re: $30 Homebrew Automated Blinds Opener (2024)

#48

Post by zymhan »

foobarian wrote: post #46
J_Shelby_J wrote: post #8

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 brigh…

The blinds shown under this article are pretty ordinary vinyl type blinds that leak a ton of light. I wish I could find blinds thick enough to behave like cardboard over windows, that could also be opened on a daily cadence. At this point I gave up on blinds and put a shirt over my eyes to sleep. I thought about just covering the windows permanently but I don't relish that idea.

Curtains.

Re: $30 Homebrew Automated Blinds Opener (2024)

#49

Post by ojame »

foobarian wrote: post #46
J_Shelby_J wrote: post #8

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 brigh…

The blinds shown under this article are pretty ordinary vinyl type blinds that leak a ton of light. I wish I could find blinds thick enough to behave like cardboard over windows, that could also be opened on a daily cadence. At this point I gave up on blinds and put a shirt over my eyes to sleep. I thought about just covering the windows permanently but I don't relish that idea.

Not sure what country you're from, but "blockout blinds" are likely what you're looking for. They blockout (essentially) all light and are operated like normal blinds.

Re: $30 Homebrew Automated Blinds Opener (2024)

#50

Post by FreebasingLLMs »

Spivak wrote: post #47
seanalltogether wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So that's a funny thing, your blinds are on the inside of your house so the sun energy is hitting them and dissipating from there. Hopefully your blinds are white and reflecting more of it out than the other surfaces it would otherwise hit. But if you want to make a real temperature difference you need blinds on the other side of the insulated box otherwise known as an awning.

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