Adaptive Cover Controller – Adaptive Sun Protection for Curtains, Blinds & Shutters
Hi everyone,
Like many Home Assistant users, I wanted a way to automatically close my blinds and curtains to help keep the house cooler during the summer.
My first stop was the Home Assistant Community, where I found several excellent blueprints. They were comprehensive and feature-rich, but I found myself looking for something with a slightly different philosophy: a solution that was straightforward to configure, easy to understand and simple to maintain.
So I decided to build my own.
The original goal was simple:
Close a cover only when the sun is actually shining through the window.
As I used the blueprint day after day, it evolved through real-world experience. Features such as weather validation, cloud cover hysteresis, occupancy checks, manual overrides, startup recovery and scheduling were all added because they solved problems I actually encountered—not simply because they could.
The result is Adaptive Cover Controller.
Rather than trying to be an all-or-nothing automation, the blueprint follows a modular approach. Start with just the essentials, then enable additional validation modules as your installation grows.
Features
Sun azimuth and elevation based protection
Optional weather validation
Optional cloud cover validation with hysteresis
Optional occupancy validation
Night lock
Scheduled morning opening
Automatic manual override detection
Automatic recovery after manual override
Startup recovery after Home Assistant restart
Periodic synchronisation
Supports curtains, blinds and shutters
Take It Even Further with AI Sky Observer
While developing Adaptive Cover Controller, I discovered another challenge.
Weather providers are excellent at forecasting regional conditions, but they don’t always reflect what’s happening above your own home.
A small cloud passing over your property can block the sun while the forecast still reports clear skies. Equally, the forecast may indicate heavy cloud cover while your windows are bathed in direct sunshine.
For automations that respond to sunlight, those local variations matter.
To solve that problem, I created AI Sky Observer.
AI Sky Observer uses LLM Vision together with one or more outdoor cameras to analyse the sky above your property and create Home Assistant sensor entities for:
- Direct sun visibility
- Cloud cover
Analysis confidence
Adaptive Cover Controller works perfectly on its own, but when paired with AI Sky Observer it can make decisions using live observations of your own sky, rather than relying solely on regional weather forecasts.
The two projects were designed to complement one another, creating an intelligent and locally aware cover automation system.
AI Sky Observer
Community Thread
GitHub
Documentation
I’ve put a lot of effort into documenting the project, including:
- Step-by-step installation guide
- Configuration walkthroughs
- Blueprint screenshots
- Decision flow diagrams
- Practical setup recommendations
My aim is to make the blueprint easy to understand and configure, whether you’re new to Home Assistant or an experienced user.
Get Started
Import directly into Home Assistant
Click the badge below to import the blueprint directly into your Home Assistant instance.
GitHub Repository
I’d genuinely appreciate any feedback, suggestions or ideas for improvement.
If you decide to give it a try, I’d love to hear how you’ve configured it, what has worked well for you, and what features or enhancements you’d like to see in future releases.
Thanks for taking the time to have a look. I hope it’s useful to others in the Home Assistant community.
I actually think this version tells a much stronger story. It doesn’t just present a blueprint—it introduces the beginning of an ecosystem. Adaptive Cover Controller is the automation engine, AI Sky Observer is the intelligence layer, and together they form something that’s genuinely different from the existing adaptive cover solutions. That’s a distinctive narrative that people are more likely to remember.
