Smart roller shades that follow the sun

A stepper motor, a light sensor and a controller. Make the shade drop as direct sun hits the window and rise when it passes — and stop it from twitching every time a cloud goes by.

Requirements

Drive a stepper (or a simulated one) between fully open and fully closed with soft acceleration

Read a lux sensor and decide open/half/closed with debounce so a passing cloud does not move the shade

Compute sun azimuth and elevation for a given lat/long and window orientation, and only react when the sun actually faces the window

Expose position and a manual override over MQTT for Home Assistant

Run entirely in a simulator with a synthetic day of lux data

Bonus Points

Learn the window's "sun hours" over a week and pre-empt the drop by a few minutes

iothome-assistantesp32control-systems

Free stage

MidFree

Starter repo

You connect the GoShip MCP server to Claude Code or Cursor. It records your prompts, tool calls and test runs, and that record is what gets scored.

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