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Industries Served

Window Shades

Challenge

The client, a construction company, assembled a team of electronics engineers to add "smart home" features to their prefabricated buildings.

Their engineering team contacted us seeking a motor control system for blinds that would be used to automatically control external heating in the summer, as well as traditional functions such as privacy.

The customer designed and prototyped a system that could place the motor on either side of the curtain, but did not conduct a manufacturing design study.

Their team of electronics engineers were smart and had good ideas, but lacked experience in mass production. We reviewed their prototype designs and found that bringing them to market required a significant amount of manufacturing design.
Customers went down this road because they did not have a clear understanding of the available motor dimensions. We were able to identify a package that could operate the shutters from within the inner void of the curtain (previously wasted space).

This enables customers not only to more efficiently install them into their builds, but also to sell them as standalone solutions outside of their existing markets.

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Solution

We looked at the design prepared by the customer and immediately noticed the challenges surrounding its ease of manufacture.

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The customer designed the transfer box with a specific motor in mind. We were able to propose a smaller brushless gear motor with sufficient performance to fit within the size of an ordinary rolling curtain.

This greatly simplifies the installation and integration of blinds, reduces manufacturing costs, and enables customers to sell blinds outside of their regular prefabricated housing business.

Result

We recognized that the client's engineering team had great ideas but little experience in mass production, so we proposed a different route to keep them down.

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Our final solution is more useful in a wider range of situations because it makes more efficient use of 60% of the space in the blind chamber.

It is estimated that the cost of our mechanism to produce their design is 35% lower, which itself is nowhere near ready for production.

After just one contact with TT MOTOR, our clients chose to be long-term partners with us.