Edit: The device has been renamed to The Ropener: Silent drape runner. The Github page has been updated to honor Nadine's contributions as well.

Hey r/homeautomation, Daniel here.

Some of you might remember the window opener or the radar speed camera I've posted here. This one's a curtain opener I call the Ropener. I posted it in r/homeassistant earlier this summer and never posted it here, so here it is with three months of field use.

Up front: I sell this. Everything is also public and you can build it without me. Details are at the bottom.

How it works. A rope loop runs along your existing rod. Two small carriages clip to the leading edge of each panel. A NEMA 17 stepper with an MK8 extruder gear pulls the rope loop. Nothing gets replaced: no new track, no motorized rod, or new curtains. It's driven by a TMC2209, so it's very quiet and especially great for a bedroom.

Control. It runs ESPHome, but you don't need Home Assistant or any hub. It serves its own web page on your LAN, and there are three buttons on the board: hold one to jog, tap for a full open or close, hold both for three seconds to set home. If you're in Apple Home, Google Home or Alexa, Matterbridge for HA works incredibly well. Home Assistant finds it on its own. No cloud, no account, no app.

What I learned in three months:

• Track curtains work, and the pull-cord kind is the easiest. A couple of customers have it on cord-drawn tracks now. One removed the factory tensioner pulley and mounted the Ropener in its place on the existing cord. Plain ceiling tracks with no cord: still being tested by another customer, so I don't know yet, but looks very promising.
• One motor for four panels works. Just print extra carriages for the same loop. The limit is drag, not torque. If all four slide easily by hand, you're fine.
• The drive gear changed and pull went from 11 lb to 15 lb. I found that the smaller-diameter MK8 adds more torque. But friction is still the problem: grommet curtains on a bare metal rod want glide tape or they'll stall halfway.
• What I still can't do: manual override. With the motor on the rope you can't pull the curtains by hand. That was the most-asked question in the last thread and I still don't have a good answer, at least not without a complete redesign and some kind of clutch mechanism. But I've never needed it in my several years of use.
• Power. 24V barrel jack. The USB-C on the board is 5 V and only for flashing. A few people wanted to run it off a power bank but I haven't tested it, and my guess is the bank's idle auto-shutoff won't allow it to work. If anyone's tried, I'd like to hear.

Files. STEP, STLs, the ESPHome YAML and the PCB (KiCad) are all public:

• GitHub: https://github.com/Valar-Systems/Ropener
• Printables: https://www.printables.com/model/1725737
• MakerWorld: https://makerworld.com/en/models/3115155-ropener-motorize-your-existing-curtains

Disclosure: I sell it. valarsystems.com. The kit with all the hardware and the controller board is $60 if you print the plastic yourself, $73 with the prints included, $90 assembled. Add $9 for a 24 V supply with a US plug. The board on its own (ESP32 + TMC2209, Wi-Fi stepper driver) is $35, and a few people have used it for things that aren't related to curtains. Everything above works without buying anything from me except that board, and even the board files are public if you'd rather fab your own.

One-minute demo video: https://youtu.be/kw-FztIAOuc

I'll be in the comments for the next few hours.

Hi all,

I recently moved into a condo being rented out. One of the previous owners had these electric blinds installed, but lost the remote. The most recent owners had curtains installed instead of trying to get the blinds working, but I was hoping I could just buy a third party remote and pair it that way.

However, I’m having trouble finding ANY identifying features of the actual motors used for the blinds. The actual rolling blinds have a “The Shade Store” tag on them, so I was hoping I would find some info about their motors on the website (no such luck). In the pictures you can see they’re wired blinds, so I can rule out battery powered ones. They just have 1 button, which begins lowering or raising one of the blinds, while the other makes a loud beep and “jogs” for a moment if held. Any info relating to getting these paired to a remote would be amazing!

Started small. My partner and I have a decent sized garden outside London and watering it manually around work schedules was getting unrealistic, especially with me on nights and them busy during the day. So I set up a basic soil moisture sensor tied to a solenoid valve through Home Assistant and told myself that was it, job done, contained project.

It was not a contained project.

Now I'm looking at outdoor motion sensors to trigger path lighting, thinking about a frost alert that could close our cold frame automatically, and I've gone down a rabbit hole on whether a cheap weather station integration would make the moisture sensor logic smarter or just add more things to debug.

The garden stuff has me wondering what else people have automated that felt niche or oddly specific at first but turned out to actually be useful day to day. Not the big obvious things like lights and heating. More the weird corner cases, the small annoyances you didn't realise were annoying until they were solved.

Also genuinely curious whether anyone has done anything around cold frames or greenhouse automation on a budget, because the commercial options I've found seem priced for people running actual market gardens, not someone with a raised bed and too much curiosity.

What was the automation that surprised you most once you'd actually lived with it for a while?

Location: US

I want to install a 15 or 20 amp 110v outlet that would connect to my battery backed up sub-panel for lvl 1 EV charging in a power outage.

Except, I also need switching ability so that I can disable the charger if the sun goes down or if the battery isn't charged.

Battery status, solar output, sun position is already available to me.

My journey so far:

• 15/20 amp din mounted relays exist, but I can't seen an ESP32 or etc solution that would pass an electrical inspection to control those relays
• < 15 amp relays exist from Shelly, but I did not find Shelly relays that could handle 15 amps
• Zooz Z70? outlets (can't sustain teh current)

Is there a good/durable locally controlled solution for 110v switching at or above 15amps?

Buying furniture for my new house I'm moving into and found I'm already making decisions based on the stuff I want to automate later lol.

I'm looking for furniture and checking the clearance underneath so the robot vacuum can get under it, thinking about where its dock should go. Same with outlets for motorized blinds, cameras, and where I want the network stuff to live.

Anyone else do this when setting up a house? What did you plan for ahead of time that you're glad you did? Just make sure there's something obvious I haven't thought of yet.

I switched my front door to the Yale Conexis L2 recently in anticipation of my eldest starting secondary school.

All my doors are keyed alike and I didn’t fancy swapping multiple locks if she lost her key. It’s largely worked well, with Auto Unlock working ~70-80% of the time. The other 20% we use the App, which is about as slow as getting your key out.

I knew it didn’t have Homekey support, but it was £130 at Costco. And lift to lock meant minimal change from current habits. I’ve left the back door/side gate key with a neighbour/parents as a backup. Paying double for homekey didn’t make much sense, particularly with 90 day return window at Costco.

Now I have an issue I didn’t anticipate. Her school doesn’t allow smartphones at all from this year. She can wear her AW, but that won’t unlock the door standalone. So I’ve given her a key fob.

Looking at other workarounds I noticed the Fingerprint smart keypad is currently £66 at Amazon. But I don’t want her punching in codes which IMO is not secure.

So my question is how reliable is the fingerprint reader? And also how fast is it, as it could also resolve the minor inconvenience of using the App when Auto Unlock doesn’t work.

All my shades have a pull cord(pull left and down to raise, right and down to lower) not beads, is there any automatic motor that works well for these kinds of shades?

Maybe I'm approaching all this smart home thing the wrong way, BUT.

I have a house with traditional wall switches. Bought a bunch of IKEA smart bulbs because I wanted to control temperature and brightness. I don't really care about turning them on and off automatically.

This is what I want to do:

Give power to the bulbs => They turn on => Press a smart button => Adjust temperature/brightness

Unfortunately, it takes 60 whole seconds and sometimes even more for my lights to connect to my Home Assistant instance. So I can't press the button shortly after turning on the lights... I have to wait. I would have expected a short delay, but I don't get why it needs to take this long.

In your experience, is this due to matter/thread? Is this due to IKEA? Do I have any hope or is what I want to do fundamentally wrong?

I've been looking at robotic mowers lately, mostly Navimow X430. Reviews make them look pretty hands-off but I’m guessing reality is a little different lol.

I’m fine still doing the edges and picking up bigger sticks. I just don’t want to be going outside every other day because the mower got stuck somewhere or never made it back to the dock.

For those of you who’ve had one for a while, how often do you actually have to mess with it now?

Also curious what mower you’re using.

I was looking up the best options for irrigation controllers as I'm having one installed soon. My requirements are: integrates with Home Assistant + doesn't require a cloud connection or any 3rd party service.

I found many years-old threads, but nothing too recent. The "best" option that was supposed to work out of the box is RainMachine, but alas it looks like they've silently gone out of business.

I'm moderately technical, so don't mind a bit of fiddling. What do people recommend for this in 2026?

I teach philosophy at a vocational school in Germany. I started building this because the sunrise alarm in the Hue app never quite did what I wanted, and I was tired of setting the same thing in three apps every night.

One alarm across all three: the Hue lights fade up over 10, 20 or 30 minutes, a Sonos favourite starts at the wake-up time, and optionally the phone rings as a backup.

The part I care most about is where the alarms live. The app writes a schedule into the Hue Bridge and an alarm into the Sonos speaker — not into the phone. They go off even if your phone is dead or you're not home. There's no account, no server, and nothing leaves your local network.

How it works underneath, since this sub tends to ask: Hue schedules go through the CLIP v1 API over HTTPS with a pinned certificate; rooms and zones come from v2. Sonos alarms go through the local SOAP endpoint on port 1400. Neither company officially supports these, and the app says so on its welcome screen — a firmware update could break it one day. The phone alarm uses AlarmKit, so it rings through silent mode and Focus.

This isn't a business. It's free, no ads, no purchases, no company behind it, and I'm not planning to change that.

What you need: iOS 26, a Hue Bridge (2nd gen or newer), Sonos optional — everything except the music works without it.

TestFlight: https://testflight.apple.com/join/CErZnJXp

I'd especially like to hear from people with older Bridges, S1 Sonos systems, or split networks with a separate IoT VLAN. Those are the cases I can't test myself, and they're where I expect it to break.

Happy to answer anything about the implementation.

I was looking to install this Tapo smart lock on my existing door. I chose Tapo because of its good battery life, but unfortunately, it doesn’t support my current door handle setup. I'm also open to other smart lock suggestions.

What would you recommend in this situation? Should I install the smart lock above the existing handle by drilling a new hole, or would it be better to replace the current handle altogether? If I replace the handle, I’m not quite sure what all I would need, since I’d also need to get a compatible exterior handle.

Any recommendations on the best approach would be appreciated!

P.S. Sorry for the poor quality image

I'm tired of forgetting to turn down the heat when airing out the house. What are your go-to smart TRV setups for automated open-window detection? Are Zigbee TRVs with separate magnetic window sensors still the most reliable route, or do newer standalone smart thermostats handle drafts well on their own?

Looks like there are limited options, and what's out there is expensive. The big issue is that the windows have a sill directly below and a soffit directly above, so repurposing a conventional linear actuator won't work.

Thoughts?

got a big glass partition between the kitchen and living area and it drives me crazy when guests are over. always end up closing blinds and killing the natural light.

been looking into switchable stuff that can go clear to frosted.

how are people controlling these things? can you just wire it into a normal smart switch or does it need its own app?

also curious if the transition is instant or if there’s any lag when you hit the button.

Hi everyone! I'm Timur, a master's student at the University of Ljubljana (Faculty of Social Sciences). I'm running a short survey for my master's thesis on how people view and use voice assistants (Siri, Google Assistant, Alexa/Echo, etc.) as part of home automation setups.

Users and non-users are both welcome - you do NOT need to own a voice assistant device to take part.

Who: anyone 18+. Where: any country (survey is in English). Time: about 10 minutes. Fully anonymous and voluntary; responses are used only for academic research and reported in aggregate.

Survey link: https://www.1ka.si/a/d7959439

Thanks so much for your help!

I’m looking for a couple outdoor cameras for around the house. I’d prefer something wireless, easy to install, and without a monthly subscription. Good coverage matters more to me than having a ton of extra features. Any models worth looking at?

Soo I need some assistance and have a question. I’m looking to set up something in an area of my house. Possibly Alexa or another smart hub.. that can detect volume by either decibel or detecting yelling. Each time the noise reaches a certain decibel it will trigger an automation to shut off a smart switch for 30 seconds. Any idea how I go about doing this?