Smart cars, smart speakers, smart headphones. It seems these days that everything is becoming smart, with perhaps the exception of people themselves. One of the latest innovations we’re starting to see is things around our home becoming “smart.” When it comes to converting a home from not-smart to smart, it can be quite costly.
Replacing all of the blinds in your home can be a huge pain, as well as quite expensive. That’s where iBlinds comes in. For $75, iBlinds can convert existing 2-2.5-inch horizontal blinds into Z-Wave controlled blinds.
Thanks to its Z-Wave integration, iBlinds can easily hook into your existing smart home ecosystem. Since Z-Wave is easily compatible with Alexa or Assistant, this should be quite simple to get up and going once you install it into your home.
Why would you want smart blinds, one might ask? It’s super simple. Blinds are one of those things that can give us as much or as little privacy as we want. But, sometimes opening and closing the blinds can be slightly difficult. There are several windows in my home that we just never open the blinds to because the controls for the blinds are out of reach normally.
If my blinds were smart, all I would have to do is ask my phone or home assistant to open or close them and boom, done. It also means that when I’m away from my home, I could easily check to see if I forgot to close the blinds. There have been several times I have left home and then realized everyone could see straight into my house, peering at my TVs and computers.
iBlinds also features schedule integration. This means that if you go out of town and have smart lights, as well as iBlinds, you can now fully automate your home to mimic your normal movements without even being there.
There is also a timer feature, so you can easily set it up to have your blinds close after a certain amount of time, meaning you’d never forget to close them again.
Another great use for smart blinds that iBlinds showcases is for the elderly or those who have mobility issues. Instead of having to try and open the blinds themselves, they could just speak and be able to easily see the world. Just as easy would be asking Amazon Alexa to close the blinds once they’re done and ready to head to bed.
iBlinds is powered by a Lithium-Ion battery which can be recharged once it dies. There’s a separate solar panel, should you choose to purchase it, to keep the battery always charged, so you’ll never worry about the built-in battery dying.
This unique smart blind system easily hides in the top part of your blinds system and hooks directly into the drive wires and shaft of your existing blinds. There’s no retrofitting or fiddling with things to make it work.
With a starting price on Indiegogo of $75, iBlinds is fairly affordable considering normal smart blinds run closer to $130 at retailers like Amazon. iBlinds estimates delivery of its product to be around October 2018, and still has a month of funding left to go, though it has already received over 190% of its funding goal.
iBlinds is a crowd-funded Indiegogo project that has no guarantee of succeeding. Our writing this article is not an official endorsement of iBlinds, nor are we responsible if the project does not succeed through crowdfunding. We do our best to ensure the projects that we cover have a high chance of success, but you, the reader, assume all responsibility by pledging your money to this project.
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