Turn your DUMB "Vertical" Blinds into SMART Vertical Blinds - Soma Blinds

i remember when i was kid my dad used to yell at me a lot because whenever i put the dogs out we had these vertical blinds and he would scream don't break the blinds and what he always meant by that is that because the vertical blinds if you try to open them up and not actually tilt them first you're more than likely going to break them after a while or they're going to get stuck it just it's a lot of work to fix so normally if you try to do it these are just window blinds but you get the idea you try to open it up and that's as far as i can go if i put pull any further than that these things are going to break so you need to actually close them and then twist them like this tilt them straight and now you can open them up all the way without any worry about breaking them whatsoever so in today's video i'm going to show you how you can automate your vertical blinds not only just tilting them but to also open them up let's jump into the video i do want to thank someone for sending these out to me for a full on this review but that's not going to square my opinion in one way or another if i don't like something i'm definitely going to let you know so pretty much every smart shade i've seen out there home kit non-home kits they never open the blinds they only tilt open the blinds and never actually open them so i actually came across this product and i was just going to use this product to open up a normal everyday shade but after playing with them for a while i actually noticed that it's actually the perfect openers for vertical blinds go ahead and make fun of my pink blinds yes i do have pink blinds in my house they were actually here when i moved in and we just haven't done a lot to the basement of this house so uh i'll be glad to get rid of these very very soon now because most vertical blinds have two pull strings or two beaded cords or in my case one of each means that you're going to need two motors one for the tilting and one to fully open and close it now of course you don't want to waste your time and you definitely don't want two different commands one for tilting and one for opening up so you can actually combine this into one smart home action or one tile within the home kit and then adjust the speed accordingly in the shade app that way you make sure that you don't have issues when you want to open it up so let me show you here open the basement blinds okay the shades are open so you can see there it tilt first and then it starts to slide now of course when you close this it's going to do the exact same thing it's gonna tilt first and then close it and that might be where you run the issues and that's where you're gonna have to play with the tilt speed that way it doesn't tilt as fast and can close a little bit more before it fully tilts but my particular case ninety percent tilt speed was good enough close the basement blinds you can see i'm not having any issues whatsoever now i'm pretty happy for the tilt speed to be around 90 and the open speed at 100 percent you're gonna have to play around with the settings yourself you might have to slow down the tilt for your particular blinds or you might have to speed it up and slow down the open but my particular case i didn't have any trouble spots until about mid way when i open it and i really didn't have any trouble spots closing it pretty much the entire way so i can actually probably go up to 100 tilt because as soon as i open it it's going to tilt and as soon as it came back there's to tilt i just slowed it down just to be on the safe side but i really only had the issue when i opened it up it went past the 50 mark if i didn't have that tilt open up 100 i would run into a lot of issues so soma has two different models they have the soma shades too and also the soma tilt if you have venetian blinds or those two inch wood blinds and have that little tilt rod then definitely get the tilt version that's designed specifically for that rod it just attaches right to it we can discuss that model in a future video let me know if you're interested in that in the comments below but today we're going to focus on the summer shades model that work on any shades curtains blinds anything that has a b cord or a cord loop which is just a pull string that you can actually loop back around so my vertical binds i have the tilt that is actually a beaded cord it's actually metal beads and the other one is a pull string it doesn't loop around so i'm going to have to cut both of those and then tie those into the provided beaded cord that comes with it because the bead coil that i have is the metal and this really small metal balls i'm not quite sure if that's going to work in this type of mother so i'm just going ahead and cut that and use the one that's included in the box now i'm sure some expert or boy scout knows how to tie these types of beaded cords together but i took the metal beads and the plastic beads the bigger plastic beads and no matter what type of knot i did it just did not want to hold i looked up different types of knots nothing worked so eventually i just came down to a big old granny knot and that's what worked for me when it came to a pull string it was a little bit easier to tie it together you're gonna have to play with it on your own and find out what works best for you now inside the box you're gonna get the motor itself you can actually take off the top and you can see where the little gear is and as you're walking through the process you can actually see how the beads go through the little gear also inside the box like i was mentioned is the provided beads i found that those beads are pretty much designed for this motor so if you can use those beads or have beads that are very similar in size you'll probably get the best results so because this does have an internal battery i think it's like 18 no 14 1450 milliamps which is a huge battery but you don't want to recharge it all the time so having a solar panel that can trickle charges every day just a little bit is going to extend that battery life enormously it also comes with a charging wire now this is kind of proprietary but it's not it has usb a on one side and then on the other side it has a three and a half millimeter audio jack which i didn't even know you could use for power but apparently you can if you happen to lose this wire unfortunately this will probably be a little bit harder to find than a normal usb wire not quite sure why you they're using a three and a half millimeter audio jack which is the exact same plug that's on the solar panel so not quite sure why they did that for but fyi is the three and a half millimeter jack now this will work with lady a google and also home kit unfortunately it is not native to home kit meaning that it's not a certified home kit product i wish it was i wish i could report that it was but unfortunately it is not but as long as you're taking precautions with good password management network segregation i don't think you're going to have any issues but if you have any security concerns this product might not be for you now the way you connect this to those platforms is through the soma connect which is extra i think 40 50 bucks also works with ifttt and smartthings so it integrates with all those different platforms this is pretty much just a raspberry pi there's not much that you can do with this but it does have to sit within bluetooth range of the shades just fyi so if you're trying to put this somewhere else in your house and your shades on the other side of the house unfortunately that won't work they say their bluetooth range on this is about 30 meters but when you're dealing with inside and dealing with wi-fi and a bunch of other types of signals inside walls electrical wires and lots of lots of electronics unfortunately that 30 meters is not true most of the time you're going to get about 30 to 40 feet inside that's going to differ for everybody you just have to test out and see what works for you so in my particular case i have the vertical blinds downstairs and my summer connect is one level up and probably about 10 to 20 feet over so it's within that 30 to 40 foot range i had no connection issues whatsoever what's great about this is that you can put it onto the current vertical blinds that you have now or current currents that you have now you don't need to change that out you don't need to spend money on new curtains or new blinds you just attach this to the be the cord or the corded loop and you're done now to get started you're going to have to download their app which i'm not quite sure why you don't call it the soma app or some shades app is actually called the smart shades app and you have to look for smart shades you have to remember to shades in your in your head whenever you want to go into it i'm primarily going to be using in home kit so i'm not going to have to remember it that often i do wish you can search for the some app because that's how i'm going to find it in the future and unfortunately i can't do that now once you get the app up and running and make a account this is super easy to set up it's going to walk you through the entire install process you're going to have to feed in the beads it'll walk you through that process one of the mistakes that i did was once it tells you to stick the motor onto the wall make sure the beads are actually tight make sure your blinds are in the middle that way it has room to go in both directions you do want to make sure when you're if you're going to cut the string or cut the beads that you currently have make sure you don't cut too much make sure you measure twice cut once make sure you have enough room for those beads to go fully up and fully back down you're going to need a lot of room so you're actually going to cut maybe just a small piece of your cord loop i think i literally took about half hour measuring testing making sure i could go up and down i made little marks on the rope i didn't want to make a mistake here because i knew i could not put in a new cord in the vertical blinds once i made that cut that is what i had to live with i'm gonna tell you once again measure twice and cut once now like i mentioned earlier i pretty much just used some granny nuts between the beaded cords that they provided in my own metal cord and then on the actual quarter loop is a little bit easier to make a knot you just want to make sure they're strong enough and make sure they don't actually pull apart make sure there's no plate in that beaded cord make sure you pull it down on the wall as far as it can go you want those wires to be tight just for the looks and for the performance now it's going to take you through some calibrations now when you're talking about vertical blinds you're going to have in the middle is where it's really open and you can actually shut it to the right or shut it to the left so inside the app you actually have to kind of reprogram it to mark off where it's actually open where it's only 50 is the open mark so you mark that as open and then close will be in the one direction you're not going to use the other direction at all and then of course with the open and closed motion that's a full open and close so you don't have to make any adjustments there also make sure the beads are not crossed in any weight or shape or form and because you're dealing with two different motors here and two different sets of beads make sure they're not touching each other make sure they can both move freely now i did enjoy setting this up in the soma shades app or smart shades app but i'm going to be using this in home kit so the way that you need to do that is with the soma connect which you set up in the soma app also the smart shades app just walk through the process i'm not going to bore you how boring it was to set up when it prompts you for the qr code you can just use the standard home bridge smart code which i'll put right up there it works with all home bridge products it will tell you that it's uncertified product you just hit continue and just walk through the normal home kit process add this to a room you can add some automations to the setup if you want to but i'll show you more of this the automation stuff later now because you're dealing with two motors here and you want to automate both of them at the same time you can actually pair these together within the home kit now like i mentioned earlier you're going to have to make the timing correctly that way for your blinds it can actually tilt enough to make sure that when it starts to open that it's actually fully tilted in the open mark now once you get these in the home kit you do want to group these two motors together in to one tile just go down in to one tile and say group with another accessory and you can add the other accessory and name both of them something else like each motor has its own name and then you want to name the group together so in my particular case it was basement blind i had one that was a tilt blind and one was an open blind or something like that but the main name of it was basement blind that way when you hit one tile it's gonna tilt and open both at the exact same time and when you hit it again it's gonna tilt and close both at the exact same time now you do want to go back to the summer or smart shades app and play with the timing or the speed of the tilt you might have to slow that down or maybe even speed up the opening or closing depending on your situation and where you start to have hiccups in my case i was about 90 percent on the speed for the tilt and 100 on the open close and once i did that i had no issues whatsoever also in the smart shades app you can set um automations for open and closing times based off of sunset or sunrise and also light levels which i'm assuming they get from the solar panel i don't see any like light sensor on here maybe it's built in here i test it out it works pretty well but remember this is light level of what's outside and not inside so if you're going to use that feature just realize that it's actually taking a light level of the outside now if you're like me you're probably not going to use the smart shades app that much except for the setup and general maintenance you're really going to be using this in home kits so in in home kit you can set up very similar automations based off a time of day uh what what day of the week it is you can have it off of sunset and sun rise unfortunately the light levels are not exposed to home kit so if you do want to use that light level feature you will have to use the smart shades app for that and when it came to the noise level of the motors i would say they're pretty loud not over bearing nuts you know you're not gonna uh you know wake up neighborhood with them but if you are a light sleeper they will definitely wake you up in the morning so they do have a setting called morning mode that's going to slow down those lines and quite significantly reduce the sound level also the only issue i have with the sonar connect is that i can't actually connect to the settings of each motor i actually have to be within bluetooth range on my phone to get into the settings of each motor it still works with home kit it still works with lady a through the soma connect but if you're trying to change it in settings or whatnot that's not gonna happen unless you're within bluetooth range of your phone i gotta admit i'm pretty impressed with this yes you do have to use two motors one for the tilt and one for the open closing but i'm so happy that they work together it works perfectly for my vertical blinds and i hope they work for you too if you guys do want to check these out i will be leaving our links down below we can pick these up um don't forget to get the summer connect since uh you do want to use this with homekit i do want to thank all my patreon members if you guys want to learn more about patreon and how you can support this channel definitely check out my patreon page right there love these guys these guys mean a lot to me i truly appreciate your love and support if you guys have any questions let me know down below if you want to see the next video in my home kit series definitely check that out right there i will see you later

Channel: ModernDayTech

Views: 35,228

Keywords: homekit, apple homekit, apple, smart home, home automation, vertical blinds, smart blinds, smart vertical blinds, best vertical blinds, soma, soma shades, soma blinds, smart home automation, ultimate vertical blinds, make my vertical blinds smart, smart vertical blind

Id: dQuEhhYFPHE

Length: 16min 36sec (996 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 27 2021