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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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
Lol agreed, I’m not buying another one. I mainly wanted to get a look* at how because I’m much better at understanding things when i can hold and inspect them.
Edit: I’ll add that my main requirement was not needing a new hub to control them, hence this zwave solution 🙂
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
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.
