Blind Control Project

Hello!

I am a beginner with an Arduino Uno and I am starting a project on opening and closing my 5 individual room blinds. I have decided to use stepper motors (28BYJ-48) with a ULN2003 driver board for each one of them. My question is, how can I connect all 5 driver boards, with their motors attached, to the Arduino Uno in such a way that I can control them all instructing them to do a single command? Should I get a Arduino Mega with a motor stepper shield? I been googling for a while and can't seem to find any way of doing so. Any help will be gratefully appreciated. Thanks

Every stepper requires 4 pins, that's a total of 20 pins.

So indeed that's a Mega, or a port extender. Or maybe dedicated stepper drivers that need less pins. Or if they all have to run at the same time for the same number of steps at all times, you can wire them in parallel. Use the same signal for all boards.

Are the 28BYJ-48 even strong enough for your blinds? Must be some pretty small and light weight blinds for that to work.

You may need limit switches for fully open/closed, for each blind. One such home-position switch is required for every stepper motor anyhow.

If you only want fully open/closed blinds, any motor kind can be used and a common up and down signal for all motors is sufficient. Then each motor can stop when its limit switch opens.

With manual adjustment you may have to control the blinds individually, in case the motors run out of sync due to different loads or possibly different sleeve diameters.