Everything the SwitchBot Blind Tilt Can Do

I have tested out a bunch of ways to retrofit your old tilt one blinds to make them smart and all of them work pretty good but in today's video I have a brand new product that costs much less that is with the switchbot blind tilt now this is on Kickstarter right now the funding ends pretty soon so if you want it you better check it out right now you can get one for about 50 bucks and a pack of three I think for a hundred and sixty nine dollars that comes with three of these as well as a hub to get it connected with all your smart voice assistants and a remote so that you can then control them manually so today I'm going to show you the Tilt blind they also sent me a humidity as well as a temperature sensor so you could use that to make some automations here we have the switchbot remote and then again you do need the switchbot Hub mini or one of their hubs for them to be connected to the internet so you could use them over Bluetooth but if you want the full control you definitely need to get The Hub so let's go ahead and get this unboxed and set up so here's the switchbot blind tilt down here you'll see that it does have a solar panel included which is really cool and then it will work with Amazon Alexa Google Assistant as well as with Siri shortcuts then IFTTT works with smart things and line clova here on the side you simply need to download the switchbot app install this on your existing blinds and then calibrate and enjoy and so you can easily use this with a remote or you can use the blind tilt get The Hub mini get the meter and use a switchbot and all the different switchbot devices available now in here there are quite a few different pieces so here is the main switch bot there then here it does come with a power cable where you can charge it up does take a few hours to charge up but it could last 10 months this will help you during the setup here we have the instructions that are very important now this will attach to the headrail of your blind and here we have the solar panel and from what I can tell you do have to use this to get these working at the top of the solar panel you'll see this little dot that is the light sensor so you can have it automate based on the light outside and here we have these different sizes that will attach to our tilt wand and then on top of those we will have this little gear Crank that will allow us to get them working so now let's go ahead and go through the install process so here we have the blind tilt now one of the first things I want to mention is switchbot says to install this on the left side of your tilt wand and here you can see that I am at the very end of the blind so with these it doesn't work the best but it does work so if your tilt is in any other place it should work fine but here on the very left side it will be a little snug and then we'll have to attach this little headrail thing and have the wire come out this other way not quite as seamless as I would like but it does the job so the first thing we're going to do is take the alignment sticker and measure our tilt wand so here we're going to just take this wrap it around now there's a hole that we slide it through and there we can see it is at the large setting so we'll use the large adapter then the next thing you want to do is take off this little piece of tape and you're going to attach it where the bottom of this rectangular part is going to be at the bottom of your Valance or blind and that's where we're going to attach the little tilt one adapter so we're going to choose the large remove the 3M adhesive from both sides and then right where that ends that's where I'm going to place this so I'm just going to wrap it around and hold it there for about 30 seconds now remove this next we're going to take the coupling untouch the little metal part here so it opens up and then we're going to attach it to the adapter right here and then squeeze it closed and latch the coupling just like so next we're going to take the solar panel and the blind tilt and we're going to plug in the USBC to the port right up here on the top now again you can charge this up first it says you charge it up for like six and a half hours and that could last 10 months or just use the solar panel so that's what we're going to do line this up so that when we twist this little piece right here it's going to lock on so it takes a second to get that in the right spot but you put it on and then you twist it there we go just like that now we're going to attach the blind tilt to the coupling here and it's how you do that is you pull this up and then this opens up now we're going to place this in and clasp it shut so there you can see that it does fit there is enough room there but the next step it wants me to put the headrail adapter over here but that doesn't really work so I'm just going to put it right up here so now we're going to hold up the solar panel and find out where this is going to go perpendicular up and then attach it there so let's put it in on that side just like that and now remove the 3M paper and now put that into place now there are some screws that you could use to attach this somewhere else maybe I could attach it on the inside here if I we're going to try something I decided to try moving this down and re-positioning where this little bracket goes to see if I could get it to work without being on the front of the headrail but I learned later it didn't work quite so well but that is the one thing I would like to see maybe slightly different is not having to mount this right on the balance of the blind so for now I'm going to put it right here but you'll see I move it in just a bit now I'm going to take the solar panel and attach it to the window just going to take that off now I'm going to place it like this so that the window could open as far as possible without hitting this and then it will be able to not be in the way so we're going to put it right over here just like so and that works great now I wish there was a little clip to have this wire stay out of the way before we go to the pairing process I want to mention that if your blinds do this it's gonna be a problem you need to make sure that your blinds are operating properly and you might need to replace the wand tilt mechanism so that they can open and close properly over time some of the clips might break and then it can't have a tight hold so replacing this will fix that problem and at this point I also ran into another issue with the way I did add that mount so my plan of moving the cord Mount does work pretty good except for when the blinds are trying to open it runs into it so I then move them out on top of the valance doesn't look the best but it does get the job done now the next step is to pair this with the switchbot app now I have already set up my hub for all the automations and everything but now let's go ahead and add the blind tilt so here in the app I'm going to select the plus to add a new device on the bottom if it doesn't show up you hold that down for three seconds until you see the white light flashing and then I'm going to tap blind tilt we've already done that we're going to select next we're going to give this a name so we're going to call this family room blind and now we're going to skip the insulation since we've already done that and we're going to calibrate the blind so we're actually going to do this manually so the first thing you need to do is close it all the way down now it also mentions do not reverse the Tilt or that will mess up the calibration and close them all the way so now we're going to open them up okay so they're flat like that then I'm going to hit next now we're going to close them all the way up so I'm going to keep going until they're closed this way looks good and then last we're going to folate open them horizontally just like that and then next and we have finished the calibration and that might be the smoothest retrofit smart blind calibration I've ever seen all right now let's test it out let's close them up and now let's open them again as you can see they may have not opened all the way so the calibration might be a little off so I might need to redo that but they work pretty great so first the install seemed pretty complicated but in the end it was actually very simple and it's a pretty cool little device on how this works right now I love how it has already been set up and calibrated but I can still use the Tilt wand manually and it's keeping track of how many turns I turn this so then when I use the app to close the blind it remembers what it had been turned and then it just closed it like it normally would so I think that's really cool I haven't seen any other smart tilt that is able to do that they always have some extra thing you need to do or you ruin the calibration by doing that so I think that is such a cool feature so now that we have it all set up and connected to the app let me show you different ways in which you can control your blind tilt now the first way is Sim simply through the app so here in the app you can see our two different blind tilts that have been connected at the top here you can see what the current position of the blind is in so right now it's fully open there you can see it's connected over Bluetooth as well as to the cloud and then here is the percentage now I do have these connected on a shady part of the home so I haven't seen it charging yet so I'm going to keep the tabs on that throughout the day and see if I can adjust the position to get it to charge even in the shade but these windows might not be the best to be able to do that so we'll open it a bunch of times and see what the battery life is and over here on the side we can simply adjust it and I love how it shows what position the blind is so I can have it fully closed down there or close up which is really cool that it has that little animation there and I can put it to fully open so next down here we have the option to close down fully open close up so we can simply touch touch those and it will go to that here we have customized actions so you can set maybe some of your favorite options you have three that you're able to adjust there and then here we have the light sensing so let's go into how that works so with light sensing you can actually adjust when they open or close based on how much light is coming into the room so there's a light sensor on the back that's why you needed to mount it this way so if we hit the plus here we can see if the illuminance gets lower than a level 2 to 10 or if it gets higher than a two to ten so if it's super bright or super low and then you have the option to fully adjust to open up open down or open close so let's go ahead and do open up so we'll set it to a hundred percent here if it gets higher than a level one and then we're going to do this so here you can choose the days of the week and then you can also adjust when all right so here it's automatically going to open if the luminance is higher than a one so that's cool that you have that option next you have a delay option where um you can set a delay so this delay allows you to open the blinds in a few minutes so let's say I put one minute and I want the blinds to be open so that means it's going to fully open in one minute I select save and now it's already started that timer and then when that timer is done it will then complete that action so there we go one minute later they automatically opened up then the next section that you have here is schedule so maybe you don't want to use those automations you just want them to automatically open every day so if we hit the add here we have the option to set the hour so let's say at 8 00 a.m do exactly 8 AM we can then have it do once or we can have it repeat so here we can have every day of the week we can have them fully open at 8 A.M so we can save that and then we would want to create another one where we have them close every day at 6 p.m so there we can say close down like that and repeat every day of the week so now those will automatically run at 8 am in the morning and 6 p.m at night now let's check out the settings so here in the settings first we have the option to adjust the name what home you have this in as well as what room it's currently in next you have customize action so on the main page or dashboard of the app there will show a few actions here you can adjust the home page action so you could have it be open and close so if you want to do it change that you can do that there you also have control page action so these are those customized actions you can have on the actual page of the blind here you have motion mode so there are actually two different modes there is a performance mode and there is a silent mode so let's go ahead and listen to Performance mode and here is the silent mode [Music] silent mode is definitely a tiny bit slower and I would say it's not quite as much of a cranking sound than the performance mode which is nice that you have those options next you have the option to recalibrate if it's not working properly here you have cloud services so here this is where you can learn about how to get them connected to Google Assistant as well as Amazon Alexa if you need help connecting those you can check out the link at the end of this video next we have an option for NFC so what we can do is get a switchbot tag so they sent me this little pack that has three NFC tags some stickers here so you can label what each tag does but here we can use this tag to run automations so under the NFC section here it says you can pair switchbot tag with your device through NFC for Speedy communication so function shortcut we could have them to be all the way closed so then here it's showing on the back of your Android device it could be by the camera or in the middle of the device so got it now it's saying hold that there all right so It beeped right there in the middle of my phone that it has been written so now is what we can do is whenever we're out of the app we just simply tap the NFC tag and then it completes the Automation and it is closing the family room blind now from what I understand is each tag can only have one action so you could have a few of these in different places you just simply tap your phone to it and it will complete that specific automation pretty cool now let's see what the switchbot remote will do for these blinds so here the switchbot remote does come with this little adhesive that it is Velcro so you could place this somewhere and then pull it off if you need to but here we have a up and a down button that we can use to interact with devices so there is a little sticky that you need to pull out from back of the battery and then it is able to instantly pair to the hub pretty easy just follow the instructions similar with the blind tilt so next we have the pair with a remote option so here I've already paired this remote to my Hub mini and here you can choose what remote so I just have one remote then you're going to choose what the bottom button does here so I have it set to close down and there I have it set to fully open so that works really great for the one blind and then if I push up it is going to open the blind over there and then the last few settings here are logs so you can see when things were actually happening here we have a user guide on getting things installed and FAQs here you can check firmware version as well as battery life on the Blind and that's the settings of the blind tilt but now let me show you how to adjust multiple blinds with one remote so let's go ahead and create a scene for the remote so we're going to tap on the remote blinds and then up here it says buttons on a remote can now trigger scenes only scenes of manual execution can be added here so now that we've read that notice we're actually going to go back and we're going to go to the scenes tab down here at the bottom so under this we have the option to create a scene so here we can set a condition here we have manual execution so that means when I press the button so then we're going to add the action so the action is that we're going to open fully open the family room blind and then we're going to add another action to open the bay blind okay great and we're going to call the scene open blinds now you'll want to remember your scene name as well as hit cloud services and hit save so that you can use this with voice assistance and we're then going to create that scene so now we have a scene to open the blinds Let's test it out oh there we go just took a second but now both of the blinds have opened which is great so now let's go and create another scene so again this is going to be manual and the action is going to close down both of the blinds and if you had other devices I believe you could add other actions in this as well so this scene is going to be called closed blinds and we're done so let's create that all right let's try and add it to the remote so we're going to go home we're going to go to remote and then here we're going to tap on the close button and here we have the option to select manual scenes so now we're going to do close blinds and then for the fully open manual scene we're going to say open blinds perfect now our remote has been set up with our different actions let's go ahead and open that one's about done and that one just started so both of those are able to run the delay is a little bit longer than I would expect but I can see that improving over time and now let's close just took a couple seconds there to start operating so let's go ahead and create a scene that we can use with the NFC tag now for that you will need to create a new scene that it's going to run so we're going to do new scene and here we're going to do NFC trigger and then we need to pair this NFC tag okay okay now we're going to add an action so with this action I'm going to fully open both of the blinds and create so here you can see there are some manual scenes and then this scene was created under Auto because when I tap this it's automatically going to happen so let's try it tap NFC is triggered and now it's running the scene now it's really great that that scene operation has been added to include all the devices you have in one room now one condition when creating a scene is you have the option to create a schedule now this is really nice because it allows you to have things automate at Sunrise or Sunset so if you want your blinds to automatically close at Sunset you could do this and then here we can choose our city and we could have it repeat once or we could have it repeat daily now this is better than creating it per device because then is what I can do is I can add multiple devices to that action so that will automatically close both of them instead of having to create two different schedules so that's pretty cool now let's go ahead and set up the thermometer and hygrometer this is a new updated model that I haven't seen before here's a sticky magnet so you can attach this to your wall here you can see it's tracking the temperature and the humidity and then is what we can do is here under scenes I'm going to create a new scene and we're going to add a condition so you can do those three but now that we've added that we have the option to choose the meter for our condition all right so here let's say if the temperature gets lower than 68 degrees it then closes the Blends so there we have the condition and now we're going to choose it's going to close add the other one all right now let's go ahead and create that and here you can see it's currently showing 67 degrees but it is automatically closing the blinds all right now let's try the voice assistant so here when connecting to the Amazon Voice Assistant it did find both of our blinds so we can tap on one of them to set up the device and the other one and so now if we go into all devices there we have our different blinds so in the blind we then have the option to open or close so let's go ahead and close that blind great now let's add these to a room so under the devices tab we're going to add this into the family room we're going to edit and then we're going to go through and select the bay window as well as the family room blend so now those are both in here they aren't grouped together but you can individually adjust those so it's closed right now let's go ahead and open it back up now let's try by voice with the Amazon assistant you can address each Blind by name close family room window damn it actually worked pretty quick it's been a little slow so I'm glad to see that that was pretty instant and you can also do both in the same room so I have both of these in the same group in the Alexa app open family room that one works and that one started so it's great to see that it has the full integration and then I can also integrate this into different routines and everything that's available with Alexa now remember those different scenes that we created you can also activate those from your different voice assistants activate close blinds a couple things share that name close blinds and opened lines which one did you want clothes blinds that one worked and then that one worked so now that we've linked it to the Google home app we're going to refresh at the top of the device and here you do see the option to set up two devices but you can also go all the way down under the link to you and here we now have our blinds available so here if we tap on it it lets us then add it to a room so we're going to move this device into our family room and now we have those both in our room now with Google Assistant it's a little bit different story you can address each Blind by name hey Google close family room window okay great that worked but then if you try and do both in the same room it is not able to do that but then I figured out how to activate those scenes right from the Google assistant and instead of using open or close you need to use activate so Google activate close blinds it then activates that scene that we set up in the switchbot app and there it closes the bay window or there it closes the family room window and then the bay window so it's great to see that I can have full control of all the things I set up in the switchbot app from the Google assistant or from Amazon Alexa now the last thing to talk about is the battery life so when setting these up of course it comes with the solar panels put those on the windows and since installing them after one day I have not seen the battery life increase at all now I do have these in a more shady part of the home the Sun never directly hits these windows so that might be the problem but let's go ahead and do a little bit of a battery test I'm going to go ahead and open and close these about 30 times so open and close counts as one time and then we'll see if the battery life changes so the blind over here is at 61 percent and the blind over here is at 70 percent so let's see if that changes after 30 times [Music] so after 30 times this one over here is still at 61 percent and this one over here did drop just a tiny bit to 69 so I definitely think these will be able to last the 10 months that switchbot says they will and then of course if you are getting any charging through the solar panel you'll never have to worry about pulling them down and charging them or sticking the charger in so great job swishbot now I did test the solar panel and it did have to be in direct sunlight to show that it was charging if something came in front of it or it was in the shade it would not charge at all so overall I'm very impressed with the new swishbot blind tilt I think it's a really fantastic device for the cost especially if you can get it right now for the kickstarter price my only complaints are the way that it is mounted it would be nice if there was a way to kind of make that a little more simplified and not on the face of the valance but I think it actually performed very well at first it was a little complicated but I'm pretty happy with it and I'm pretty sure this is the only smart blind that you can still do the Tilt with and it interacts and you don't have to recalibrate it every time the other things of improvement could just be a little bit of speed when interacting with those scenes on the remote or even with voice assistance that does take a little bit of time but I'm completely happy with how these are operating how they quickly they can open and close and I really think they are going to last a long time with that battery life so if you have any further questions about this device please let me know in the comments below and if you want to check them out as well make sure you check the link in the description as there's only a couple days left on the kickstarter thank you so much for watching we'll see you on the next one

Channel: Tech With Brett

Views: 38,682

Keywords: Tech With Brett, SwitchBot, SwitchBot Blind Tilt, Smart Blinds, Automate Old Blinds, amazon alexa, Google Assistant, Cheap smart blinds

Id: aXgkvA853co

Length: 28min 45sec (1725 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 16 2022