They are analog roller shades. I feel like it could be a decent project but my budget isn’t great, so i do want to know if that is something worth DIYing or not. Also I wouldn’t know what micro controller to use.
Any tips?
Edit: also does anyone know of any federated /r/homeautomation equivalent?
Disclaimer: I havent done this (yet)
My plan for this (just bought the curtains) is to use normal analog curtains and add one of these: https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/devices/ZNJLBL01LM.html (or similar)
And connect it to the rest of my MQTT home automation, but that might be a big setup if it is just for curtains.
My home automation setup is Home Assistant and Node Red, using Zigbee2MQTT on a Raspberry pi
Look into open source ZigBee bridges for home automation. A colleague of mine currently has a project going, which makes her Raspberry Pi act like a bridge and it talks to other home automation stuff via ZigBee.
Then you can use stuff like this to control the motor of the curtain.
Great thing is that you can handle your complete home automation like this, but it might be harder and expensive to setup than just using proprietary bridges and actors.
I’ve done this for vertical blinds using this: https://github.com/kp-bit/xblinds but for my big roller blind I used a commercial solution, the motor on the DIY version wasn’t strong enough even with a planetary gear box added.
Then for the automation I’m using home assistant
This was the commercial one: https://amzn.eu/d/hdkUyNh
It would be a really quick and easy project with a pulley and a continuous servo and a raspberry pi as the controller
IKEA makes controllable blinds. They are costly, but not even remotely close to what Lutron has.
