Achieved

The end result of the project met our expectations. We were able to establish sustained communication between the light controller and the shades and were able to wireless control the shades. We were also able to have the system adjust brightness based off of the ambient light in the room and current brightness settings. The motor hookup proved to be more difficult than we anticipated as it required finding shades which did not require too much force but also had looped strings/chains which could be passed through the motor. The web interface also provided difficulties. The HTTP protocol was something not heavily researched and caused varying results in the behavior of the ESP module. It did however, function properly on occasion and allowed manual control of the shades.

The designed conformed well to the applicable standards. The communication protocol developed was designed to remove any areas of uncertainty in the operation of the system. It proved to be a complex system to be completed within the given time frame. We also attempted to improve the final product by making the motor controller system compact and aesthetic.

Lawful Use

Precaution was taken not to infringe on any existing patents. We also made sure that any code utilized was properly given credit. The esp8266 library is free software under the terms of GNU public license. Several Adafruit libraries were used (touchscreen interface) but were properly given credit in the source code. The pt_cornell library was also given credit and care was taken to conform to it’s use agreement. We did not reverse-engineer any known design for a light control system and did not infringe on any patent that we know of. There may be an opportunity to patent this design for a retrofit light controller system but it will necessarily have to be very specific, as other patents in this domain appear to be.