I’ve got some decent window blinds at my house (tilt as well as roll-up and -down), but I didn’t want to shell out another couple hundred per-window to make them “smart”, let alone being tied to a cloud service that could spontaneous combust any day now…
I’ve done numerous searches, but have not found anything decent that I could use to retrofit to add any sort of automation to these blinds. The best I could find were purpose-built and/or roller shades.
Is anyone here aware of any projects or products that can be added to a set of blinds to locally automate any of their features? I’m running latest stable Home Assistant in a container, with HACS, if that helps.
TIA!
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There’s a bunch of things you can add to normal blinds to make them smart, the problem you’ll face is that most of them are battery powered.
First example: https://a.aliexpress.com/_EGSpRhZ
Second example: https://a.aliexpress.com/_EwOUwWR
Those are kinda what I mentioned originally. The first is for roller shades, the second for curtains. They’re good at what they do, but that’s not blinds.
I’m fine with them being battery powered. The nice thing about having a window right there is that it can have a small solar panel up high to recharge if needed.
I’ve got several sensors and even a deadbolt that run on battery, and they go for over a year before needing a replacement.
The even bigger issue is that AFAIK every single one of those things is really intended more for things like roller shades, not venetian blinds, and automates the raising/lowering, not the tilt.
Speaking for myself, if I were going to settle for a solution that only automated one function instead of both, it would need to be the tilting, not the raising/lowering.
I’ve used these for the last year or so on my blinds. They work over Bluetooth so one at a time can be controlled despite them being in a home assistant group. This means if I close both of them, I watch one close first and then the other shortly after. Maybe another Bluetooth radio would work? Not sure. But I like the product itself because there is no other ecosystem and it’s all local. Also solar powered so no cables running everywhere :-).
I grabbed one of these and attached to our largest blinds and they work phenomenally. The main issue is cost, but I really just wanted something as a proof of “how” to do it, and hope to come up with a cheaper homebrew later on.
At ~$160 each?
I’ll stick with Switchbot
