How to make your blinds smart on a low budget.

So, you’ve got yourself into the money pit that is home automation. You’ve got your lights controlled by motion sensors, your home secured with a smart lock, yet —  you want your bedroom blinds to rise up automatically in the morning to help you wake up.

There are many different smart blinds on the market, unfortunately they are all pretty expensive and require you to refit a whole new blind.

Brunt caught my eye whilst browsing through Indiegogo for smart tech. The simple idea that you just need to add a motor rather than a whole blind appealed to me being that I’m a tenant.

I took a shot for £82 + shipping.

A month later I received my Blind Engine…

First impressions

It arrived in very Apple-esque packing and clear instructions of how to set it up. You can either fix it permanently to the wall with screws or use a sticky strip that comes in the box.

I had to use the sticky strip:

I downloaded the Brunt app onto my iPhone. The app in general is very good, however you do get the odd screen of Korean even though the language is set to English.

Setting up the Brunt app

Set up is pretty simple, it’s not HomeKit compatible (yet according to Brunt) so you have to connect to the motors wireless network and then allow it to add your wireless network via your phone. It’s not complicated, it’s just not as easy as a HomeKit setup. Only downside is that the app tends to log you out all the time, so you end up re-logging in each time you open it.

Timers

This is the part that I wanted to work with the most. I wanted to use the blinds to help me wake up by letting daylight in. So I set it to open at 7:30am and close at 8pm.

Now, whilst the morning one is fine. I do ideally want the blinds to close at sunset so that my lights aren’t shining out after dark. We can’t do this out of the box.

Enter Homebridge

Now I mentioned earlier that HomeKit isn’t officially supported by Brunt. However for those of us that are impatient, some awesome guy has created a Homebridge plugin for Brunt.

If you haven’t heard of Homebridge before, it’s essentially the communities answer to some manufacturers providing smart device support but neglecting to support HomeKit. In all seriousness, it’s due to the stringent requirements and hoops that manufacturers have to jump through to receive HomeKit certification. Anyway — Homebridge — It’s slightly technical to set up so isn’t for everyone, however it can raise your smart home game considerably.

This guide is going to work on the premise that you’ve already got a Homebridge set up. If you haven’t, check out my guide on Homebridge.

My hub is a Raspberry Pi so we’ll ssh in:

ssh pi@raspberrypi.local

We’ll then install the home bridge plugin

npm install -g homebridge-brunt

Now we’re going to need to add Brunt to our config.json file. If you followed my guide this will be in /var/homebridge/.

If like me you would rather use a GUI than using nano through terminal, you can use your chosen FTP app. I use Transmit.

Within your platforms section you’ll need to add this block

As per the documentation:

"platform": Must always be "Brunt" (required)
"name": Can be anything (required)
"user": Brunt account email address (required)
"pass": Password for Brunt account (required)

Let’s make sure our syntax is correct, I use: https://jsonlint.com

All good? Let’s restart Homebridge.

sudo service homebridge restart

Let’s check for errors:

sudo service homebridge status

If everything has gone to plan you should see Homebridge running in the background and loading in the Brunt plugin.

Now go to the Home app on your iOS device. You should have new accessory(ies) in your room that your Homebridge hub is assigned to. This could be called Default Room. Voila! Now you can add the blind(s) into whichever room they are in.

Automating blinds at sunrise and sunset

Now under the Automations tab we can set a sunset routine.

We’re now complete. Our blinds rise in the morning and close at sunset. You can of course use the Sunrise trigger to open your blinds if you like getting up at 5am.

Since I bought my Blind Engine, they have now launched on Amazon.