Help choosing hardware for my first Arduino project

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bobbynies

New member
I'm trying to design a system to control and motorize roller shades, with the goals of:

Fitting the motor and controller inside of a 1.5" diameter roller tube

Status/control via MQTT over WiFi or Z-Wave (I want to be able to do precise open % status/control, which the "dumb" roller shade motors like Rollerhouse don't do)

(I have 2-conductor low voltage wire available at each window location to run power.)

I've been hacking away at home automation for years but never ventured into Arduino land. However, after spending months digging around at motorized shade options, I think building my own is going to be the best bet to get what I want. Plus I'll finally learn Arduino!

I believe I will need a geared stepper motor (this type recommended by Rob of The Hook Up for shades).

To control and power it, I believe (this is where I'm getting a bit lost) I need an Arduino board and a motor driver...right? Here's what I'm wondering if I can use:

Arduino Nano 33 IoT

Adafruit stepper/featherwing add-on

Am I on the right track here? An important consideration for this project is physically fitting this stuff inside the shade tube, so before I go to far with designing a housing I want to at least make sure I've identified hardware that can achieve what I want.
 
One of the ESP8266 platforms will give you a better environment. Arduino supports this platform and most Arduino libs work well on it. I would get one of the D1 Mini variants. They fit inside a 1" PVC pipe so should fit in your application. WiFi is well integrated and it has enough IO to do motor control.
 
Is there a motor driver that fits inside a PVC? I don't think I have one that both takes 3.3V in and has that small a form factor. A simple power mosfet would work, but then you lose the optoisolation.
 
You might contact Bill Porter, either on here or at his website, "mind of bill porter" (http://billporter.info) I vaguely recall that he did the very thing you're wanting to do.
bobbynies said:
I'm trying to design a system to control and motorize roller shades, with the goals of:

Fitting the motor and controller inside of a 1.5" diameter roller tube

Status/control via MQTT over WiFi or Z-Wave (I want to be able to do precise open % status/control, which the "dumb" roller shade motors like Rollerhouse don't do)

(I have 2-conductor low voltage wire available at each window location to run power.)

I've been hacking away at home automation for years but never ventured into Arduino land. However, after spending months digging around at motorized shade options, I think building my own is going to be the best bet to get what I want. Plus I'll finally learn Arduino!

I believe I will need a geared stepper motor (this type recommended by Rob of The Hook Up for shades).

To control and power it, I believe (this is where I'm getting a bit lost) I need an Arduino board and a motor driver...right? Here's what I'm wondering if I can use:

Arduino Nano 33 IoT

Adafruit stepper/featherwing add-on

Am I on the right track here? An important consideration for this project is physically fitting this stuff inside the shade tube, so before I go to far with designing a housing I want to at least make sure I've identified hardware that can achieve what I want.
Click to expand...
 
bobbynies said:
I'm trying to design a system to control and motorize roller shades, with the goals of:

Fitting the motor and controller inside of a 1.5" diameter roller tube

Status/control via MQTT over WiFi or Z-Wave (I want to be able to do precise open % status/control, which the "dumb" roller shade motors like Rollerhouse don't do)

(I have 2-conductor low voltage wire available at each window location to run power.)

I've been hacking away at home automation for years but never ventured into Arduino land. However, after spending months digging around at motorized shade options, I think building my own is going to be the best bet to get what I want. Plus I'll finally learn Arduino!

I believe I will need a geared stepper motor (this type recommended by Rob of The Hook Up for shades).

To control and power it, I believe (this is where I'm getting a bit lost) I need an Arduino board and a motor driver...right? Here's what I'm wondering if I can use:

Arduino Nano 33 IoT

Adafruit stepper/featherwing add-on

Am I on the right track here? An important consideration for this project is physically fitting this stuff inside the shade tube, so before I go to far with designing a housing I want to at least make sure I've identified hardware that can achieve what I want.
Click to expand...
Are you using Home Assistant to control this MQTT roller shade?

Home Assistant has 'ESPhome' integration available. Code in the yaml variant, flash to an esp32/esp8266 and connect your motor.
The ESP boards have built in WiFi, or versions with Ethernet.


Even if you are not using Home Assistant, ESPhome now support running without Home Assistant.
I suggest finding what other ways it could be made with other resources made :).
 
I didn't find any explicit mention of sensor features in the pixel stick v4 introductory description on github, but I assume that the OP would like to have the widgets report status, among other things, the sensed position of the shade (up, down or in-between, based perhaps on micro-switch closures) and maybe whether or not the motor is stalled out. Or did I miss that in my cursory reading?
 
MQTT would deal with the sensors and send commands to the V4 SW. You would have an HA enabled control triggering an HA event that gets sent to the HA service (the stick).

So you are correct, the V4 SW does not support a switch input. But with MQTT or Alexa support (yes Alexa integration is in V4), it does not need it.
 
I think that I don't have a picture in my head of what the OP would put in each roller shade, likely due to having a minimal understanding of MQTT.

Edited: Or more likely, no picture of what widgets are attached to each shade.
 
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