These past few months I spent mostly at home, as everyone else, and decided to take on a project to improve my time there. With three kids at our cozy apartment, it’s no wonder I loved spending a lot of time on our balcony. While I like the breeze and the view, I hated lowering and raising the sun shade. It’s a heavy shade, so it took more effort and time to operate than a regular bedroom window shade/blinds. I challenged myself to automate this shade by any means necessary!
I found a strong motor, designed a circuit and programmed a microcontroller to run the show. I mounted a switch box with up/down buttons and used NFC to support “shade presets”. Finally, I got everything connected to the internet and respond to voice commands from Google Assistant. The result:
That was quite a journey.