Blind Automation

I have been adding more smart home automations and the one I've been want to tackle the most is automated blinds. My living room opens up to the second floor and which means two rows of windows with the top ones being a good 15 feet off the ground. When the Texas sun comes through in the summer it can really heat up the house in addition to adding a lot of glare in the home.

So I've recently come across the Switchbot blind tilts and have added those to one set of the lower blinds for testing. It works fine through the app and there is an additional hub but since I run all devices through Home Assistant for automation and to keep things local, this wasn't a great option.

I came across this video of setting up ESP 32 with Home Assistant. Basically this allows an ESP32 microcontroller, which can be purchased for about $5 to act as a bluetooth proxy. This is a long of way saying I could extend Home Assistant's control of devices to the blind tilts. ESP32 controllers are great to tinker with and there a ton of project ideas out there if you're interested. Essentially once I add the ESP Home add-on to Home Assistant, there is a list of ready made projects to help with flashing the controller. This sounds more intimidating than it is. Once you flash the controller (about 2 minutes), Home Assistant immediately saw the device. I added and then immediately detected the switchbot tilt.

I have 4 more blind tilts and will pick up the pre-cut blinds for the upper windows, along with renting some scaffolding for the setup. The tilts are an easy install and take less than 5 minutes to set up on the blinds. This will allow for automation of opening the blinds on the top windows along with setting the tilts on timers to block out the worst of sun coming through.