Arduino-powered roller blinds

Tired of adjusting your blinds depending on outside lighting conditions? YouTuber “Dial” has the solution!

Perhaps you’ve seen hacks where people hook a servo up to blinds to flip them open and shut. If, however, you have the kind of blinds that need to be pulled all the way up to let light in, things become a little more tricky. Dial serves up an incredible solution in the video below, with a servo fixture that holds the balls on a blind’s roll up rope in a setup that could be described as the inverse of how a bicycle sprocket works.

This is interesting enough, but after finding that the rope needed 4x the force that the stepper was capable of, a gear train system was devised using Matthias Wandel’s gear generator. Making it even more impressive, only hand tools were used to complete this build, and it employs an Arduino Uno to automatically raise and lower the blinds depending on lighting conditions.

More info on the project’s parts as well as other useful websites are listed in the video description found here.

from Arduino Blog http://bit.ly/2cunZoL