***Disclosure****: I'm the builder and this is turning into a small product. No store link here; the interactive is in a comment.*

**Background**: in 2019 I put commercial smart tilt motors on eight windows. They died one by one, and because installing them meant pulling out the native cord spool, every dead motor left a blind with no manual control at all. So I set three rules for the replacement: the cord always works, motorized or dead; the blind always knows its real position, even after a hand pull; and when something wears out you replace a cheap part, not the unit.

What the video shows, at the real 5-second tilt speed:

\- Left dial, the tilt rod. The bar is the slat plane: flat is open, vertical is closed either way.  
\- Right dial, a 16T crown gear driven off a 12T spur on the rod. It turns rod rotation onto a vertical axis over an AS5600 magnetic encoder, with two magnets lying flat in its recess.  
\- The numbers at the bottom. The encoder counts the rod, not the motor, so a hand pull on the cord shows up in HA/Apple Home exactly like an app command. No step counting, nothing to re-home after a power cut.  
\- Not shown: the drive side. An N20 gearmotor turns a self-locking worm through a friction clutch, and the pull-cord spool sits on the worm's axle. Motor or cord, it's the same worm turning, and the clutch is what lets your hand win. I spent a year trying to out-engineer the clutch and it kept winning.

It lives inside ordinary 2-inch horizontal blinds (high-profile 2 x 2.25 in headrails, cord or wand), talks Matter over Wi-Fi with no hub or account, and serves its own control page on your LAN. Not CSA-certified yet, so you get the "uncertified accessory" prompt.

**Honest status**: it runs on the bench on the production board; first units ship in November; zero customer windows yet.

**Two questions for this sub**: if you've had motorized blinds die, did they take manual control with them? And is a friction clutch as the whole overload strategy a bad idea in your experience?

My smart blinds died and took the pull cord with them, so I built one where the cord always works