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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 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by [email protected] to c/homeassistant

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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] 4 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

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

[–] grue 7 points 6 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

You're right and all my blinds are Venetian, so I should've thought of that.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

Sorry I couldn't be of more help