Tag Archives: blinds

Turn Your Regular Blinds into Smart Voice-Activated Ones With This Clever Retrofit IoT Accessory

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Designed to work with almost every chain-operated blind and shade out there, the Arpobot Smart Shade is a Matter-compliant IoT accessory that transforms your analog blinds into voice-activated automatic ones. Just snap the Arpobot Smart Shade in place and it gets to work without requiring extra hubs or separate apps… just your Apple/Google/Amazon smart home platform.

As someone who has blinds in their house, I can attest to the fact that operating them is a chore. Unlike curtains that can be opened or closed with a simple swipe, blinds require constant tugging and pulling to adjust their length gradually, whether you’re closing them or opening them. Multiply that by the number of blinds in your house and that just becomes an unnecessary waste of time. Faced with this annoying dilemma, Francis Guo decided to just automate the process by designing a clever attachment that would operate the blinds without requiring human effort. The Arpobot Smart Shade is a simple device that attaches to your existing set of blinds, turning them into smart blinds that you can either activate using voice commands or using smart-home routines.

Designers: Francis Guo, Sijun Hou, Mike Zhou, Feng Yin, Maolin Li, Eric Xie and Yiwei Sun

Click Here to Buy Now: $99 $205 ($106 off). Hurry, only 7/250 left!

With an outwardly simple design that’s easy to install, the Arpobot Smart Shade snaps onto your windowsill, letting you feed the blind’s beaded chain into it. Its benign, minimalist design blends well into almost every interior space, more so with the decorative fascia that come in marble, wood, and plain white finishes to give the Arpobot Smart Shade a pristine and homely touch. Underneath the fascia, however, is the IoT-powered motor that operates the blinds by working like an automatic pulley of sorts.

The Arpobot Smart Shade works with a whole slew of blinds and shades that rely on a bead-chain mechanism. Whether it’s a horizontal blind, a roller shade, roman shade, or cellular shade, the Arpobot Smart Shade easily retrofits onto your existing piece of decor, working seamlessly without needing you to change anything or even bust out a toolkit. The bot glues to your wall or windowpane, lets you feed the chain in, and plugs shut.

It runs on a removable 4000mAh battery that can easily be replaced when it runs out of charge, and the battery unit even doubles as a power bank for your phone so you can easily buy a few spares to use around the house with your gadgets as well as with the Smart Shade and even future products from Arpobot.

Setting the Arpobot Smart Shade up takes mere minutes too. It doesn’t come with any extra hardware or even its own app, and pairs directly with your smart home software. Just pair the Arpobot Smart Shade up with your smart home app, set its minimum and maximum limits (so the Arpobot knows when to stop opening or closing your blinds), and you’re ready to go. The bot works directly with Siri, Google, and Alexa thanks to the Matter IoT protocol, making it more useful across ecosystems and with other devices around your house! The Arpobot Smart Shade starts at a discounted price of $149 AUD ($95 USD) which includes a single Arpobot along with one removable battery. The Arpobot Smart Shade ships globally starting December 2023.

Click Here to Buy Now: $99 $205 ($106 off). Hurry, only 7/250 left!

The post Turn Your Regular Blinds into Smart Voice-Activated Ones With This Clever Retrofit IoT Accessory first appeared on Yanko Design.

This inventive window blind based LG speaker will impress anyone who sees it in action

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Window blinds are an essential part of our homes, serving multiple purposes such as providing privacy, blocking outdoor light, and enhancing the overall aesthetics of a room. Some of us even use these blinds as projector screen. Now here is a window blind that doubles as a speaker with a rollable screen. Designed for LG, the screen is not for projection, but to display information in sync with the music being played.

This unique RE’ST (as it is called) is designed to be mounted on the inside of the window frame, just like traditional blinds. However, instead of fabric or vinyl slats, the blind is made up of a screen that rolls down from the bar-esque body of the speaker system. When the blind is not used, the screen rolls back for a seamless appearance.

Designer: HoChul Shin, Jiun Park, Minji Kim, Seungjun Jeon

What makes RE’ST impressive is the integrated speaker system. Combined with an automatic blind, the window blind speaker system provides a richer sound experience. The speaker (with volume display onboard) is hidden in a bar within the top of the blind, providing a clean, minimalist look, accompanied by mood lighting and beam projection.

One of the significant advantages of the RE’ST is its convenience. Instead of having to install separate speakers and projector, this minimalistic design fits perfectly into any decor style, enhancing the overall aesthetics of the room. The mood lighting around the system enhances the immersive feeling while the screen rolled down from the bar displays daily routine notifications or video to match the music mood using the beam projector onboard.

On first glimpse, RE’ST looks bulky. It seems to have a protruding appearance, but the bracket behind the speaker sits flush with the wall and supports the system nicely. Designed in three colors inspired by the warm sunlight penetrating a window, the speaker blind can be controlled using a portable Assistant display. You can adjust the volume, change the media displayed on the screen, and control the blind’s position with just a few taps on the Assistant sitting on the nightstand.

The post This inventive window blind based LG speaker will impress anyone who sees it in action first appeared on Yanko Design.

This interactive partition system separates spaces physically, but unites people with playfulness!

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Inspired by a detail found on Korean drums (where you adjust the drum’s tautness by interacting with the strings on its side), the Gyozip is a partitioning system that’s more focused on creating something that isn’t socially destructive. Rather than separating people in a literal sense, the Gyozip is a physical separator, but it’s also a canvas where people on both sides of the partition can interact with it, creating art in the process.

The Gyozip features an outer frame with multiple cords running vertically, and conical channels that slide up and down, either separating the cords or clustering them together. These conical channels help either distribute or accumulate the cords, changing how they look from afar. Arrange the channels in a variety of patterns and the Gyozip looks less like a partition and more like an art installation that serves the functional purpose of dividing a space. However, it still encourages social interaction between people on either side, inviting them to participate in the playful process of creating art on the Gyozip’s dynamic surface!

Designer: Ji Yoon Kim

Blinds that capture solar power and your attention

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The Rolar Blinds do three things. They harness the energy of the sun, they cut the glare of the sun out during the day, keeping your indoors ambient, and they look absolutely gorgeous while they do the above two.

The Rolar Blinds stand at the crux between new-age photovoltaic printing techniques, a rise in demand for solar panels, and absolute graphic beauty, as they explore printing solar cells in manners that almost feel like graffiti, but with a more direct purpose, i.e., charging your devices. At the bottom of the blinds rest the cylindrical weights that come with a USB port that let you charge your devices or your power-banks by simply plugging them into the curtain and leaving them on a table nearby or the windowsill as you tap into the solar system’s largest (free) power source. The cylindrical members (battery packs) are even detachable, allowing you to carry your power with you. However, the convenience of the Rolar Blinds takes second place to its graphical beauty that bring art and technology together beautifully and seamlessly.

Designer: Nathan Webb

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Phone-Charging Curtains!

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The Solar Blind is one of those designs that’ll make you wonder… “Hey, why didn’t I think of that?!”. This design transforms everyday blinds into a multifunctional, efficient way to harness the sun’s energy. Whether it’s at home, the office, or even in a coffee shop, users can tap right into clean electricity to power and charge their devices.

Solar cells are attached to each slat on the blind, creating an entire system that’s capable of storing and converting solar energy into electrical power. While large roof-mounted solar panels can be expensive and difficult to install, Solar Blinds only require a window to absorb solar energy and generate power.

Designer: Park Yonghwa, Lee Sang Jun, Hwang Ki Nam, & Lee Danbee

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No Tea. All Shade!

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Enlighten is an energy-independent, intelligent window shield designed to seamlessly fit any window to create a custom interior atmosphere. It also adapts to the constantly changing weather to more efficiently manage light and heat as it enters the space. Enlighten has three core components: a multi-layered self-adhering glass film, an extruded aluminium smart housing, and an intuitive control wand. The veil itself comprises several thin film layers. First, a transparent photovoltaic layer that captures the sun’s energy to power the device. The next few layers utilise liquid crystal technology to control the opacity, colour and design of the veil – enabling Enlighten to endlessly change its appearance.

Enlighten is a 2015 Red Dot Award: Design Concept winner.

Designer: Jacques Laramie & Eleanor Sandford

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