About 15 years ago I bought some surplus Makita drapery motors (http://tinyurl.com/bqpafrt, opens in google groups), figured out how to use them, and then never did anything with them.
In the meantime, I've done a lot of embedded programming, including on AVR micros. When OLPC decided to use some extra circuit board space to create the XO Stick boards (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XO_Stick), I wanted to build something with one of them, and I remembered my motors. We've lost some trees around the house lately, so the privacy afforded by the bedroom window blinds has become more important. It seemed like the right time for some automation.
And now, in the morning, I can open the blinds at either end of the room to see what it's like outside before I ever get out of bed.
The complete project gives full up/down control of a single window blind. (I've built two, one for each window.) The blind can be controlled with a button mounted near the window (mine are clipped to the curtain), or from a recycled IR remote. There are IR commands to raise and lower the blind, and three preset positions may be configured for one-touch adjustment. There's provision for a hard limit switch, so that a runaway motor won't drag the blind off the window. There's also a serial console port with a simple command-line interface, very useful for development and debugging.
It's all written in C, using avr-gcc. The processor on the XO Stick is an ATtiny861. It does not use any of the USB capabilities of the XO Stick, for either booting or operation: I have a USBTiny programmer that I use for programming, and there's no real need for USB for this project. Also, it doesn't use any of the Arduino libraries -- it's all in raw C.
While my particular application is fairly specific to my needs, I tried to write the main loop and the IR, button, timer, and software-driven uart modules in a fairly generic way, for ease of reuse.
The XO Stick is described here http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XO_Stick and here http://cananian.livejournal.com/66129.html. While the XOrduino is way more powerful, it's overkill for most of my home project needs, it's more expensive, and it's much harder to solder together. In addition, the XO Stick has some on-board prototyping area which is very useful for the inevitable extra components that come along with any project.
In addition to the XO Stick itself, I needed a limit switch that could be triggered somehow by something attached to the cord on the blind, an IR sensor, and an external pushbutton. I built the IR sensor and the button into the same little module, small enough to be clipped to the curtain. I reused the clip from a badge holder that I got at some conference or other, and the "case" for the module is the transparent plastic box that once held an SD card.
For the limit switch, I initially made my own magnetic sensor from an old reed switch and some aluminum tubing.
I mounted that parallel to and even with the bottom of the window sill, and triggered it with a magnet fastened to the blind cord. that worked, but was harder to mount than I'd like. I think I'll explore using a standard burglar-alarm style magnetic sensor next.
[ In the end, I made two changes to the limit switch mechanism. First, I did switch to a normally open burglar-alarm style window sensor, mounted not at the window sill but down on the box that holds the motor, close to the cord winding pulley. Second, I connected the switch's normally open contact directly to the AVR RESET line. I realized that doing anything else left the limit mechanism to whatever software or hardware glitch might have kept the normal start/stop mechanisms from working in the first place. ]
The motors themselves include an odd combination of digital hardware. There's some 12V logic that includes closure-to-ground control for motor on/off and direction control. There's also a 5V circuit that drives a per-rotation pulse.
More detail of the motor here , here , and here .
I tapped into that 5V supply for the XO Stick power. The per-rotation pulse was useable directly, and I used a couple of mosfets for the closure to ground inputs to the motor. I may have been able to do something simpler, but mosfets are pretty simple, and I wasn't sure exactly what kind of logic family I was connecting to.
The business end of the motor is a thing that pops out to mate with the drapery mechanism when the motor is engaged -- it was a way of leaving the curtains in "neutral" so that they could be adjusted by hand when not using the motor. I didn't use that facility at all -- happily there's also a hole in the end of the motor shaft, and I was able to stick in a tight-fitting nail (with a couple of washers added) to act as a spool.
The XO Stick schematic itself describes most of the project.
The schematic for the IR receiver can practically be read from the photo , but here's a rough diagram:
+---+ Panasonic PNA4602M or Sharp GP1UX511QS IR receiver
| O | (looking at the front)
| |
TTT pin 3 is Vcc
123 pin 2 is GND
||| pin 1 is Vout
|||
||+----+----------------- Vcc
|| |
|| === .1uf bypass cap
|| |
|+-----+----------------- ground
||
|+----+PB+--------------- push button
|
+------------------------ IR output
The pinouts I chose for the three connectors are:
LED end cable color
of board ----------
6-pin, to motor
GND black
MOTOR_DIR PA1 green
MOTOR_ON PA0 blue
nc
MOTOR_TURN PA2 brown
+5 red
2-pin, to limit switch
LIMIT PA3 yellow
GND black
4-pin, to IR sensor
GND black
BUTTON PB2 yellow
IR PA4 green
+5 red
USB end
of board
That's about it. Oh -- I did need to add a pull-down to the motor on/off input (PA0) to keep the motor from turning on while programming the chip. That 15K resistor goes from PA0 to ground.
the IR remotes have 5 buttons defined:
top, middle, bottom, stop, and alt.
these buttons have the following meanings:
top: move blind to top position
middle: move blind to middle position
bottom: move blind to bottom position
stop: stop blind movement
alt top
alt bottom: force blind up/down past the top/bottom position
alt alt top
alt alt middle
alt alt bottom: set the top/middle/bottom position
alt alt alt stop: invert the sense of up/down
alt alt alt alt alt stop: reset all positions to default