Easy & Affordable Smart Blinds in MINUTES!

automated blinds and curtains are one of those smart home automations that are so visually appealing but can often be quite daunting to tackle akara thinks they can help you solve this with their new acara e1 roller shade a zigbee based roller shade that works with your existing blinds to help you fully automate them with your smart home but just how easy is it to fit and how well does that actually work full transparency as always akara did send me their e1 roller shade for me to check out now the akara e1 is a retrofit device meaning that rather than replacing your existing blinds it is designed to operate the existing mechanism of your shade more specifically bead style blinds and it is completely battery operated since it uses the zigbee 3.0 protocol it will instantly pair to your acara hub meaning it will work with google home scale and homekit or you can connect it directly to your existing zigbee network for example if you use home assistant the e1 comes in at 59.99 in the uk which is around 80 us dollars the only thing i would really have liked to have seen included here would have been the addition of a light sensor which would make automating the blinds based on how much light is actually hitting the shades an absolute breeze installing the e1 is a very straightforward process as a removable backplate that you can use to mark the spot on the wall where you actually need it and either use the included 3m double-sided tape to stick it to the wall or for a more secure fit there are two screw holes just make sure that the beads are pulled down and fairly tight wherever you place it i went with the sticking it to the wall option and honestly it feels really solid so far after that slide back on the main unit and then select the adapter that fits your beads best the e1 comes with a few different adapters to suit the majority of beads and they just pull off and push on really easily once you have the correct adapter fitted you can then slide the cover plate back on after fitting it to the wall you will then want to set the top and bottom limits of the blind use the physical buttons to set it to your desired fully open height and then press the up button five times in quick succession to save that position then repeat the process with the fully closed position and that really is it for the setup process it really is very very simple and you can legitimately install this in under five minutes maybe ten if you decided to screw it into the wall you can now pair it to your smart home platform of choice be that the acara smart home hub or direct to home assistant if you have an existing zigbee network and i will show you both of these to get the e1 into pairing mode you simply press the little reset button on the bottom for five seconds until the light flashes blue once joined to the acara smart home app you will have access to be able to control the blind fully up or fully down as well as everything in between as well as the battery life and create scenes and automations if you decide to use a voice assistant such as google home you can say things like set the office blind to 50 percent that was just a quick overview of the acara smart home ecosystem if you want a full breakdown and more details on how that works then please check out the other video which i'll have linked up here where we go into much more detail on everything you need to know i found that the acara e1 also works with home assistant and i am using zha inside of my home assistant and it pairs right up the only thing that doesn't work at the moment since this is an unreleased device is the battery information but i think that should be corrected soon if you're using zigbee to mqtt this should also work no problem since that does tend to support more devices out of the box other than that everything else works great and you can control the blind easily i'm sure you all know this but just in case someone was curious if you control the blind using the physical buttons on the e1 driver the state change will also be reflected inside of both the akara app and home assistant so that they don't get out of sync acara don't seem to provide any max weight or size of blinds that you can use with the e1 but during testing i found i could add an additional 1.5 kilos on top of the weight of my blind and that is the max that the e1 could actually lift any more than that and it wasn't possible for it to move it not exactly an exact specification for you but hopefully it should give you a rough idea of what the e1 can actually do in terms of battery life i haven't been able to fully test the battery life on the e1 yet but acara says that you should get around two months of life from the battery based on a once up and down per day scenario you can also leave this plugged in permanently if it is convenient for you to do so and it uses a usb type-c for charging finally if you are wondering how loud the e1 is for a bedroom scenario then here is a quick sound clip it's not the quietest of devices but certainly not the loudest either there isn't a slow or a silent mode so what you see here is what you will get so there we go that is the acara e1 roller shade driver and i think for the price point and how easy this is to install it is a great little device and i can see these being very popular i also really like that they are using removable adapters because that makes it very easy to 3d print your own adapters to potentially make this work with different types of blinds perhaps ones that are string based instead being zigbee 3.0 certified 2 is also something that i love to see so glad that has been included here all in all if you are looking for an inexpensive way to automate some window blinds that is easy to set up and just works then the acara e1 is a great way to do that but that is about going to do it for this video hopefully you guys enjoyed it and uh let me know do you guys currently or are you planning to automate your blinds if so what are you currently using and what do you think of the new acara e1 do let me know in the comments box down below other than that i hope you guys enjoyed this video and if you want to support the channel you can do so by becoming a patron on patreon and your support allows me to keep on making these videos thank you to all my current patreon supporters as always your support is very much appreciated make sure to drop this video a like and get subscribed and i will see you in the next video

Channel: Everything Smart Home

Views: 83,674

Keywords: smart home, home automation, smart home ideas, smart home tech, aqara e1, aqara smart blinds, smart blinds, motorized blinds, aqara zigbee, aqara shades, aqara e1 roller shade driver, aqara roller shade driver e1, zigbee blind, zigbee shade, smart shades, automated shades, automatic blinds, smart home blinds, smart home shades, aqara smart home

Id: 2IZViTXbdZo

Length: 6min 56sec (416 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 21 2021