Recently I have gotten obsessive about making everything in my apartment “smart,” even things that probably don’t need to be. I’ve got Hue lights and timers and switches and motion sensors, but I wanted to get my blinds to open and close automatically from my phone or with voice commands. After looking around, anything that was actually HomeKit compatible was prohibitively expensive, so I decided to do it myself, and to pass my wisdom onto you.
Part 1: Building the Blinds
Part 2: Controlling them from an iPhone
Part 3: HomeKit Integration
Parts List
Hardware
Software
Part 1: Building the Blinds
One you have gotten together all your stuff, the first thing that you are going to do is open up your blinds and take everything out of the tube. There is only one piece that you will need to salvage, everything else can go in the trash. Take the clear plastic piece at the end of the roller mechanism and just pull it until it comes off. No need to be gentle.
Once you have pulled it off, you will cut off the end where it attached, and then cut it in half, so that you have two separate cylinders, one with a slightly tapered end.
These two pieces are eventually going to fit onto the motor gears, but right now they most definitely do not. So using whatever tool you have available (I used a dremel with a sanding wheel), continue to hollow out the interior of each tube until you can press them onto the motor gears. Note that you won’t need to do anything to the tapered side, as long as the other side will fit over the motor. Once you are done, put them on like so: