Blinds Automated With Offline Voice Recognition

Blinds are great for keeping light out or letting light in on demand, but few of us appreciate having to walk over and wind them open and shut on the regular. [DIY Builder] resented this very task, so set about creating an automated system to do the job for him.

The blinds in question use a ball chain to open and close, which made them relatively easy to interface with mechanically. [DIY Builder] set up a NEMA 17 stepper motor with an appropriate 3D-printed gear to interface with the chain, allowing it to move the blinds accurately. The motor is controlled via an Arduino Nano and an A4988 stepper motor driver.

However, that only covered the mechanical side of things. [DIY Builder] wanted to take the build a step further by making the blinds voice activated. To achieve this, the Arduino Nano was kitted out with a DFRobot Gravity voice recognition module. It’s a super simple way to do voice recognition—it’s an entirely offline solution with no cloud computing or internet connection required. You just set it up to respond to simple commands and it does the rest.

The result is a voice activated blind that works reliably whether your internet is up or not. We’ve seen some other great projects in this space, too. Video after the break.

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DIY Automated Roller Blinds

Controlling blinds using off the shelf solutions can be expensive – more so if you have multiple blinds you want to control. [HumanSkunk87] felt the cost was too high, so they designed a controller to automatically open and close the blinds.

The main part of this build is a motor and a ball chain gear – a wheel that captures the balls of a ball chain so that the chain can be pulled. The wheel was designed using Fusion3D and then printed out. The motor requires enough power to pull the chain — [HumanSkunk87] figures it needs to be able to pull about 2.5kg in order to raise the blind. After giving up on stepper motors, a DC motor with a worm gear was found to have enough torque to work. A WEMOS D1 Mini controls the motor controller that drives the ball chain wheel. Two micro switches tell the WEMOS when to stop at the bottom and top of the window.

The WEMOS is programmed using ESPHome and it connects to [HumanSkunk87]’s HomeAssistant to complete the automation. Check out the descriptions in the link for the parts and the code used to run everything. There are many other creative ways to open your blinds, It’s even possible to automate curtains instead of blinds.

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Automated Blinds Open The Window To Our Heart

[Brian Harms] made his living room window blinds open and close automatically using servos, an Arduino, and a SmartThings Arduino shield. Best of all, it’s connected to his Amazon Echo so that merely saying “Alexa, turn on/off the blinds” will open and close them.

To accomplish the feat [Brian] used two laser cut acrylic gears; one of which was attached to the servo horn, and the other to the long square rod running the length of the blinds. Despite using the bulky Arduino and shield, the finished product is inconspicuous and streamlined, and the single Arduino controls all three of the blinds in the living room. [Brian] answered a bunch of questions on a Reddit thread.

Blinds are a common connected home hack, and while none of the hacks we’ve covered in the past were voice activated, we have seen temp-sensitive blinds and a Raspberry Pi-based solution.

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Hacking Window Blinds To Interface With Home Automation System

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Home automation is great, but what happens when you start mixing different systems around the house together? Follow [Bithead’s] journey of interfacing with his motorized blinds!

After having his original blinds fall apart many times, [Bithead] and his wife decided to invest in some new, motorized blinds — but [Bithead] wanted to add it to his home automation setup… Unfortunately, commercial offerings for that are very expensive, so [Bithead] knew he’d have to figure out how to interface with the system manually.

The problem is, companies don’t typically advertise the kind of in depth information us hackers would love to know about products, so [Bithead] started checking out store showrooms. Salespeople didn’t quite understand his focused attention on the control boxes!

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