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Home Assistant is open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server. Available for free at home-assistant.io

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Smart-ening Window Blinds (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

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 :-).

https://us.switch-bot.com/products/switchbot-blind-tilt

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

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

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

At ~$160 each?

I’ll stick with Switchbot