The Canopy Shade System senses naturally occuring sunlight to assist in controlling in-home temperatures. The system integrates with the Nest smart thermostat to gather data about current and ideal temperatures within a users home, combining this with sensor data and user defined preferences to set shade height in order to let in or block out sunlight and thus natural heat.

Canopy Shade System Details



Canopy Block Diagram

Light Sensor

  • A photodiode detects outside light levels between 1lx and 100klx
  • This data is passed through a logarithmic amplifier to convert it to a usable signal for the microcontroller


Shade Actuator

  • A servo motor is used to control the angle of shade slats
  • A physical switch allow for manually overriding shade behavior and setting it to a specific angle


Controls and Communication

  • An Adafruit Huzzah board communicates with the Nest cloud for information about the users home
  • The board also communicates with an Amazon Web Services database which holds user preferences shade monitoring data
  • Decisions are made based off of a combination of Nest data, sensor data, and user preferences to set the shades behavior


Android Application

  • Users can set the device up on their in-home network using our Android mobile app
  • The app provides an interface to set preferences and view current shade data and behavior
  • The users preferences are push to the Amazon Web Services database to allow control from any location with internet access


Meet The Canopy Team


Justin Thibodeau (CSE)

Team manager
WiFi setup and communication, onboard AWS integration, Nest integration

Jack Curci (EE)

Light sensor design and integration, PCB design and fabrication

Michael Chapman (CSE)

Shade actuator design and control, shade behavior modes and manual override

Zachary Windoloski (CSE)

Mobile app development, in-app AWS integration

Prof. Csaba Andras Moritz

Team Advisor