Retrofitted motor mount for blinds automation

thingiverse

This design secures a 28BYJ stepper motor in place, allowing it to rotate the worm gear driver commonly found in household blinds. Several projects utilize a motor mounted in a 2" track and drives the rod directly, but my blinds feature a 1" track, making it impossible to fit a motor inside. The mount is designed to slide into a 1" track and can be adjusted along every axis that matters. It's assembled using M3 bolts, nuts, and washers. A couple of motor adapters have been included, but there are likely many different types available. If needed, the Fusion360 design can be found on GrabCAD for creating alternative adapters. My setup uses an A4988 driver with 28BYJ-48 motors converted to bipolar mode, paired with an ESP8266 running Esphome. Additional information is available in a writeup at blog.christophermullins.com/2020/02/16/automating-blinds-with-a-retrofitted-external-motor/. To print the mount: 1. PETG works best; PLA is too brittle, and white eSun PETG was used for this project. 2. The motor plate and arm should be printed with supports for the rings, while the slider tracks can be printed without supports and bridging works fine.