New IKEA Fridans motorization solution

Actually to edit, I can roll them down now just fine with the plastic piece on the bottom of the blinds (I guess the weight helps with gravity) but I cannot roll them up without helping the motor. It just screeches.

Hi @dr_torch,

first of all, great to hear that you have built the project and sorry to hear that you are encountering issues. The Adafruit motor does not have a lot of power, so depending on the tolerances in your setup, that motor might just not be enough for the 200cm blinds. I updated my recommendation in the BOM accordingly.

Which motor from my Aliexpress link did you buy? There are many motors on Aliexpress with different torque ratings that look identical. I recommend a motor with a stall torque of 0.5nm or more (it said 5Nm on GitHub, that is now also corrected). This would be the 50rpm model according to the table below:

EDIT: I have updated my recommendation to the 6V 39RPMmodel on GitHub, that’s the one I use and that should be plenty of torque.

Also:

  • My blinds were not straight out of the factory so I had to bend them a little over my knee. Wobbling increases the torque requirements.
  • The blinds come with a counter spring for making it easier to roll them up. Now I don’t suspect this is an issue with your blinds as you are also reporting trouble rolling them down, but for the record, you can increase the counter spring tension by rolling the blinds down a little, then taking them out of their mounts and manually wrapping the fabric around the tube again until they are wound up before inserting them back into the mounts. (You’d decrease the counter spring tension the other way.)

Hello @AndBu … thanks so much for the reply and your helpful information.

So, with the motor I ended up with the 71 which I see now has only 0.8 kg*cm of torque. I went and ordered the 39 one but it will take a while to get here. I find AliExpress to be a bit confusing initially. Now I understand I can order many different motors from the same link. Anyway, it’s a learning experiance.

I can see what you mean with the spring tensioner. As the blinds roll up the go quite a bit faster once they get going. I set up a magnetic switch at the top and I was a bit concerned they would just zoom past it, but they do stop.

It’s all on a breadboard right now and it looks super ugly. Any tips on soldering to the perfboard? For places where multiple wires connect (like the ground for instance) so you just solder them all onto one hole on the perfboard? I have to say my soldering skills are not that great but they do seem to be getting better.

Thanks and hope you have a great day!

Hi, I also got the 71RPM one but on my 140cm it works, albeit it does strain a bit when going up.

About the perfboard, I also had trouble so I designed a PCB to fit my ESP32-C3-SuperMini, DRV8833, and a 5pin and 3pin JST XH ports. Just ordered it from JLCPCB for around $5 shipped so it should be here in 2-3 weeks, I can share the gerber file now but be warned it hasn’t been tested.

If you’re using another controller, you should be able to learn some basic PCB design and make your own in an hour or so. I used EasyEDA on the JLC website.

Just writing to say thank you very much @AndBu for the project. I did make a couple of modifications to the esphome yaml on github to support dynamic start and stop points, and rolling down the blind a certain %.

I also modified the switch holder, mine seemed to keep catching on the “tongue” of the limit switch, so i removed the cross-bar and mounted it the other way around, with the tongue facing upwards, will post a picture later when I’m bothered to get a chair to reach the blind

Thanks @marcbodea. Getting a PCB printed is a great idea!

I’m using a D1 mini pro so I will need to design a slightly different board. I’m also using a magnetic contact switch but I could put a 2 pin header for that.

I’ll give give it a go and keep you posted.

@marcbodea, great to see you here as well. I was super happy to see your pull request on GitHub :grin:. Also thanks for posting your PCB here! I am still curious to see your print and assembly :upside_down_face:. Great idea tp use the ESP Super Mini board. Currently debating with myself if I should switch to that version for my future builds but I still have so many Wemos D1 and S2 board laying around.

I pretty much have a PCB ready as well that I am currently testing:

The board has essentially the same layout as the proposed perfboard with a couple of added features:

  • You can choose between a DRV8833 and the MX1508 DC/DC motor driver; both are super affordable (albeit, only one channel is used).
  • You can fit a USB-C power decoy and a POL converter so you can go for higher motor drive voltages as long as your USB-C power supply supports it
  • With the two USB-C ports, it should be daisy-chainable, but I haven’t tested this yet
  • The new version fits an INA219 current sensor board; you can use it for projects where you want to e.g. detect endstops based on current spikes
  • The PINOUT IS CHANGED; the original pinout of my protoboard example didn’t allow for easily splitting up the IOs for projects where no rotary encoder is used.

Are you guys interested in this board? I could release a test version of the above design here that uses a Wemos D1 mini.

Hey @AndBu … thanks for the post.

I’d be interested in the PCB design and I could go and get a few made for myself.

I’ve been working with EasyEDA but I am struggling a bit to figure out the traces. Last night I was trying to place them all on one side of the board. Now I realize there are 2 sides to a PCB (or more if you want more layers) so I will give it another go.

Been a long time since I produced a PCB and it was back in high school where you took a piece of copper board and drew lines on it with a marker and then dipped it in a bath of solution to eat away at the rest of the copper. Designing it with software is much cooler :slight_smile:

I have a couple of Wemo D1s kicking around now and quite a few DRV8833 boards so I’m going to go to IKEA and buy some more blinds haha.

For “local” control I have been using a Zooz ZEN37 Zwave remote but I was also thinking I could run a momentary contact switch to the Wemo board as I missed the manual closing and opening of the blinds.

Alright. I’ll try out the newest version ASAP. I will upload the gerber files to the GitHub repo after I confirm all the basic features work. My daytime job is killing me at the moment so it might take a few days :expressionless:. @dr_torch, I highly recommend learning KiCad.

That’s quite a bit more advanced than mine haha, looks amazing

I went for the c3 super mini because that’s the cheapest widely available board I could find honestly, and I’ve been having good experiences with them using them in this project and a couple of everything presence lite “clones” (as in my own hardware running a slightly modified version of their software)

I have now added the gerber files to the repository here: YAIFM/PCB at main · AndBu/YAIFM · GitHub. Feel free to play with it :).

The PCB is not fully tested yet, but 5V operation without the INA219 option is confirmed working (close JP1 and JP2). And, I cannot stress this enough: PINOUT IS NOT THE SAME AS THE PROTOBOARD VERSION.