AC reducing Smart Blinds

One of the the fastest ways our buildings heat up in the summer months are through the windows. Sunlight may feel nice at first, but it packs serious heat. As your building warms, you need to crank that AC, increasing greenhouse gas emissions. Now, smart blinds do exist, but not like this, and not for as cheap as I reached due to the optimization of several components.

1 Motor is in charge of angling and raising the blinds, instead of 2. This reduces cost to manufacture. but what I find cool is that its smart with Z-Wave. Z-Wave is a mesh wireless standard that is frequency independent from WiFi (thus causing no interruptions to your YouTube!), incredibly secure, and scales to several hundred units per network with ease. Its also crazy low power, with some Z-wave remotes powered by only the physical action of your button clicks! By Using Zwave integration, we turned these cool motorized but dumb blinds and made them talk to each other, and all oversee able by one computer. This solution scales so well, that I truly believe this would be a fast and easy way for large buildings to cut on AC and carbon emissions as the blinds can adjust how much light to let in themselves.

A motor is controlled by an arduino through 4 Mosfets in a circuit I came up with, allowing me to set the speed and direction of the motor easily. That arduino also talks to a Zwave receiver, originally designed to control LED strips, but with a bit of programming magic, I was able to turn its analog signals to digital to have to usable by the arduino to receive Z-Wave data. On the other end of the Zwave network lays a ZWave hub, which acts as a middle man between Zwave and general computer networks. In this case, its a USB stick hooked up to my computer. I am using a Open Source software known as OpenHab to control it and to also allow me to write my own scripts (and even website) to control the Zwave chip through Node-Red (a JS based language based off of flow). Through all that I was able to get a website partially working, but ran out of time.

This project is a bit of a tower of duct tape. With more time, I would have done more things myself instead of using APIs. Yet still I was able to pull something in the end that works.

I am very happy that my motor driver circuit works so well, despite it usually requiring a circuit board. These events really teach you to think on your feet, because you don't have time to buy stuff online!

I learned a whole lot more about circuit design, and integrations between Node-Red and Z-Wave.

Besides using nicer looking materials (and actual reflective blinds), I would like to use a fragmented gear design to better shrink the blinder raising component so it operates less like a garage door and more like blinds, still with just 1 motor!