Comment by neilv
21 hours ago
What are the child safety considerations to be careful of, with blinds, and with openers?
(I recall seeing warning stickers and design changes on ordinary miniblinds. I suspect that one of the changes involved having multiple pull cords be separate and loose, rather than a fastened together or a single looped cord. But I'd guess that's not the only safety design decision.)
UL 325 covers them and can be read (but not printed or saved) on UL’s website if you register. More dangerous than you might think though the real horror stories are with stage curtains. PSA for hacker news: Safety is the product of a process, not a feature, and standards are written in blood. You don’t get there by surmising, no matter how skilled, clever, or well-intentioned you are.
It totally can be saved if you try hard enough (and are not afraid of a pretty scary legal warning in the free view feature).
If the UL devs read this: if you want to cut your AWS bill, perhaps don’t send the images as BMP?
I think the principle two things are “they can’t pull it off the wall and onto themselves” and “they can’t hang themselves”.
With automatic openers you add “they can’t get snarled up/lose a finger in the mechanism” and “they can’t electrocute themselves”.
I went extremely belt and braces with our blind opener - but it is toddler proof. Attached the lower end of the cord to the ceiling, attached a pulley that hangs on the cord, hung a 1kg weight from it, and used a solenoid from a broken linktap valve to pull a pin that allows the weight to fall and pull the cord.
Even with the blinds open the whole assemblage is entirely out of her reach, and it goes for the opposite effect to the poster’s implementation - blinds slam open in about half a second with a quiet whirr, as I prefer a jarring wakeup, and my wife would sleep through Armageddon. Reset is manual, but that’s fine, closing them is an optional and trivial activity.
What in Rube Goldberg is this setup?
What are the safety considerations of smart blinds opening up a bedroom at inopportune moments, such as children playing outside while you're having sex or changing clothes?
Is there a lockout mode for "I/we are not decent" or do the blinds just sort of majestically reveal the bedroom to your backyard/parking lot observers like curtains opening on a feature film?
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