if Apple made window blinds...
(I recall seeing warning stickers and design changes on ordinary miniblinds. I suspect that one of the changes involved having multiple pull cords be separate and loose, rather than a fastened together or a single looped cord. But I'd guess that's not the only safety design decision.)
With automatic openers you add “they can’t get snarled up/lose a finger in the mechanism” and “they can’t electrocute themselves”.
I went extremely belt and braces with our blind opener - but it is toddler proof. Attached the lower end of the cord to the ceiling, attached a pulley that hangs on the cord, hung a 1kg weight from it, and used a solenoid from a broken linktap valve to pull a pin that allows the weight to fall and pull the cord.
Even with the blinds open the whole assemblage is entirely out of her reach, and it goes for the opposite effect to the poster’s implementation - blinds slam open in about half a second with a quiet whirr, as I prefer a jarring wakeup, and my wife would sleep through Armageddon. Reset is manual, but that’s fine, closing them is an optional and trivial activity.
Is there a lockout mode for "I/we are not decent" or do the blinds just sort of majestically reveal the bedroom to your backyard/parking lot observers like curtains opening on a feature film?
If the UL devs read this: if you want to cut your AWS bill, perhaps don’t send the images as BMP?
As in a lot of home automation actually makes things worse. Replacing a convenient light switch with an app? 100% terrible idea and actually makes things inconvenient, don't automate those.
But the blinds, specifically those in your bedroom? Do it! One of those life hacks that's really not that expensive and makes your life better with 0 cognitive load after initial setup.
Quite opposite - I’m searching for way to completely black out the room since kids will wake up with slightest shred of light, far before daycare starts. And I’m not even living if far lats.
But yeah I still want them for convenience. Problem is I don’t want cables dangling around curtains and battery options are limited.
The key to proper home automation is not to destroy the "normal" functions already in place, but to augment them with automation.
Smart switches that do not function without connectivity are not smart. I discourage new implementation of smart-bulbs too as they break the "normal" bulb-switch function. I discourage smart plugs for the same reason. Same thing with valves. Imagine a valve that cannot be turned on or off manually. Horrific.
But nothing has the quality of life impact of smart blinds. It’s the best, and probably only, way to reliably keep your sleep schedule in sync. Smart lightbulbs - four of the brightest you can buy - are nothing compared to a window on a cloudy day.
It's got some sharp edges - every time I've done a major auto-update it's broken something critical. You can run it alongside other controllers like the Hue Bridge, which is nice to have as a backup (since 90% of what most people connect is smart lighting). Probably the most useful simple automation I have is an motion activated dim light in the bathroom at night, but that's using Hue.
Then look at ESPHome, which is an ecosystem for making your own DIY sensors and controllers that can feed into HA. For example we have a Sensirion air quality sensor that triggers a smart switch connected to a fan if the particulate level gets high when cooking. You can go a very long way with on/off to control non-smart devices, and your sensors don't need to be particularly accurate (like absolute PM2.5) as long as the conditon you trigger on is repeatable.
The only thing to think about is what hardware ecosystem makes sense for you. For example there's at least four different competing standards for connectivity (WiFi, Zigbee, Z-Wave, Matter/Thread, etc). So getting a Zigbee dongle isn't a bad idea because then you can connect any IKEA or Hue device (among others).
I wish I had time to bike shed like this. Just learning, tinkering, and enjoying life.
After you have electric-controlled rollers, you can control them via any automation you want by installing a "Shelly Plus 2PM" device behind each switch.
I connect the Shellys to home assistant, and from there, trigger all the rollers to go down a certain number of minutes after sunset. They all rise at a certain time in the morning. You can always trigger them manually too, of course. ChatGPT can spit out very complex YAML for HA if you want to make life easier, your only limit is your imagination.
...That's not how that works. One of the relays is going to close first, and those set of contacts will take all the load. Similarly, one set is going to bear all the drama from breaking the connection (and with the motor, there's inductive kickback.)
The correct way to do this is to look up the motor rating for your relay and then size accordingly, not to do dumb shit like "oh I'll just double up these two relays."
Of course he fucks up and uses a resistor from mains to logic, too. Mains and logic should never, ever, ever come anywhere near each other. They're supposed to be physically isolated on a PCB, cutouts in the board, even.
Don't fuck with mains / appliances / HVAC / household water supply if you don't know what you're doing. This guy has no fucking idea what he's doing, and some winter day he's going to come home to a house that's 100 degrees inside and a flooded first floor (notice he didn't connect the water leak sensor?)
Home insurance is scummy, annoying, difficult and weasely in the best of circumstances. The second they figure out you had some chewing gum and duct tape hodgepodge running your dishwasher and that's what caused the flood, they will not only refuse to pay, they'll cancel your coverage on the spot.
Then you find out the joys of not having home insurance coverage on a house with a mortgage.
Edit: Holy christ I missed this part: "It seemed to be due to the push-on jumper cables either becoming too loose after years of jiggling or perhaps oxidizing and self-insulating a bit."
That is how you start a fire, people.
allenrb•3h ago
01100011•3h ago
cpgxiii•3h ago
To elaborate more, current sensing is only "better" in an ease-of-implementation sense, in that a lot of motor drivers already have current sensing built in/easily added. For some applications this is good-enough, but in terms of estimating "real number" torque from current, it can take a lot of work to characterize for geared motors.
buescher•2h ago
cpgxiii•2h ago
In the robotics world this is sometimes distinguished between actuators that report "effort" (i.e. a current-derived estimate) and actuators that report torque (i.e. actual torque sensing or direct-drive with current sensing). Both can be useful, but "effort" is not torque.
buescher•2h ago
cpgxiii•1h ago
As it stands, Universal Robots (and likely their clones) do use current->torque characterization for their actuators (which, amusingly, is then stored on a robot-specific USB drive or SD card), and their torque sensing is shit. Shit enough that for any useful force/torque application you still need a separate force/torque sensor. Schunk, for some of their electric parallel grippers with "force" feedback, only characterizes them at a single velocity and there is significant error in the force estimate at any other speed. Good current->torque characterization of a complete actuator is so difficult that approximately no vendors in the automation space are willing to do it.
numpad0•38m ago
... so I doubt motor torque be end all be all. Especially when Sony does it like that.