CurtainBot

Inspiration

We wanted to make a device that would allow you to sleep with your curtains closed, but automatically open them when the sun rises in the morning, so you can wake up easier.

What it does

The device uses a photoresistor to measure brightness, and a DC motor driven by an H-bridge to move the curtains. It uses a photo-interrupt sensor to determine if the curtains are closed or open, as the curtains can be moved manually too, by switching the device into manual mode through a button. We also built an app using Blynk and intended to make our device WiFi compatible using an ESP32 microcontroller, so that the curtains can be opened/closed remotely. For example, the user might have left their house with the curtains open, and don't want anyone to be able to see inside, so they could close it remotely when they realized they left it open.

How we built it

See previous

Challenges we ran into

We built our device using an Arduino Nano, which is not WiFi compatible, and we weren't able to migrate it to the ESP32. We built a working app and code for the ESP32, that uses WiFi to remotely turn an LED on and off through a button in the app. Based on what we made, it's easy to see that everything we did on the Arduino could be migrated to the ESP32, but we were unable to build our actual device on the ESP32 because we did not have a soldering iron to solder the header pins to use it with a breadboard. However, both the device and the WiFi demo are both fully funtional, just not fully integrated, which shows that we very well could have integrated them if we had the necessary tools.