Attempt @ Automation

Lately, I've been thinking about getting more sunlight into my room, but having to climb over my bed with dirty street clothes just to open my blinds isn't ideal. So I'm going to try to automate opening my blinds, that way I don't have to worry about doing it manually!

At first I wanted to get the blinds to open and close with by clapping my hands, but after being unable to get the tiny microphone sensor I have to actually detect the sounds from farther than 1 inch, I figured it was probably a dead end.

My second idea is to make an IR remote instead, this should allow me to set up two codes on the remote. One code to open the blinds, the other to close them, although I'll have to research that a bit more because I'm not really sure how I can make the Arduino I have to remember the last state of the blinds. Apparently the ESP8266 wifi module I have can create IR codes that the Arduino can decode, but I've yet to mess with this

The third idea I'm throwing around now is to just have the blinds open during daylight hours, and close at night. This path requires the Arduino to read data from the light sensor I have and use it to determine whether or not the blinds should remain open, which is kind of easier than trying to do IR codes. However, I still need to figure out how to memorize the state of the blinds, as well as figure out how to only get the motor to spin the blinds opener for a certain length of time. I think I might have to just get a servo motor instead of the simple DC motors I have on me since they can be turned to a precise angle, but we'll see.

I've already got some code libraries downloaded from inside the programming environment, which could probably solve some of the issues I'm having as well as make it easier to program this project, I'll just have to experiment and figure out how everything works.