Our two-member team (I and AlexCrawford) set out to make an automatic blinds controller. This has always been
a personal problem for me. I typically close the blinds at night to block outdoor
and street lighting at night, but in the morning my room stays dark and for
that reason I do not wake up to natural light and don’t feel fresh in the morning!
To solve this problem, we designed a blinds controller that connects to the
house Wi-Fi network and can be controlled with an iPhone app and rolls up the blinds
when your alarm goes off on your phone! We decided to design the blinds
controller that retrofits most blinds meanwhile making the installation
effortless without requiring any drilling and screwing to the wall. The design
retrofits most blinds that use a pulley system with a ball-chain or rope similar
to the one below.
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To provide Wi-Fi connectivity, we
used an amazing plug-and-play solution offered by Electric Imp. Basically, Imp
is an all-inclusive Wi-Fi solution that comes in a SD-card form factor. Imp is equipped
with a powerful ARM CORTEX-M3 processor and standard Wi-Fi radio. Electric Imp
is specifically designed for home automation applications and is making Wi-Fi
connectivity a breeze! To program Imp you need nothing! No extra software and
tool. You basically log into Electric Imp website, write your code into your
browser inside a Cloud-based IDE hosted on Electric Imp servers. Then your code
gets compiled into a byte-code and is pushed into the Imp SD-card device over
the air through the Wi-Fi connection.
However before using Imp, you
first have to connect it your home Wi-Fi. That means if your home WIFI is
password protected, you need to pass the network name (SSID) and password information
to your Imp SD-card device. No problem! Imp has built a slick interface called Blinkup
to do this. First, you should download and install Electric Imp app on your
iPhone/Android Phone. Then you log into the app and select your home Wi-Fi
network from the list shown on the screen. Next, you should hold your phone
screen close to the SD card’s end that has a tiny photodetection sensor. Your phone screen starts flashing/blinking to transfer
the information to the device. Basically your Wi-Fi information is encoded and modulated
by screen illumination. Cool! Isn’t it?
To program Imp, you should write your code in Squirrel
programming language. Don’t be intimidated by the name. Squirrel syntax is very
similar to JavaScript and the learning curve is super-fast. Imp provides 4 or 5 I/Os that can be configured as digital in/out, analog
in/out, PWM, UART, I2C, SPI,…
We drew the binds controller's schematic and layout in
Upverter. Upverter is an amazing cloud-based platform that makes design of
electronics super simple and collaborative. Users collaborate on Upverter to
create part footprints and simulation models. They can also share and publish
their designs under different licenses. You can draw your schematics and layout
directly inside the editor in your browser. Upverter has an amazing support
team. They typically respond to requests within minutes on the website if you
run into any issues. More interestingly, once you are done with your design,
Upverter can send your design directly to manufacturers to get your PCB made.
Finally, the design files for from hackathon is shared on Github
and Upverter:
Electric Imp and Upverter Websites:
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