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I’ve seen a lot of tutorials on how to automate manual shades and blinds, well in this one we’ll automate electric shades. We’ll cover electric shades ran by continuous current (DC) electric motors that open or close by reversing the polarity of the current. Although if you buy electric shades you’ll get some automation there are reason for doing the automation on your own like: * you may have only a switch near them for up/down control; * it’s cheaper (some companies offer advanced automation for a lot of extra $$); * even cheaper if you buy the electric shades kit from ebay and assemble them your self (a single shade kit is around 50$); * more flexible, you can program them do open or close on various circumstances, we’ll learn about making a webserver in python that will connect to the shades bluetooth interface, and expose an API to control the shades, we’ll also be integrating it with thingspeak and there you could do things like control the shades on a time schedule or control it via sensor input. This will be an intermediate tutorial, you’ll need skills like soldering, arduino programming, basic electronic understanding, and some how to install services on a server, running and configuring them.”

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