[HN Gopher] Garage Door Monitor
___________________________________________________________________
Garage Door Monitor
Author : zapbeeb
Score : 82 points
Date : 2021-06-26 06:02 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| redgrange wrote:
| I wanted to build such a thing and ended up just putting a nest
| camera in the garage to see how things look: open, closed, lights
| left on, etc
| Johnny555 wrote:
| Another option for those that don't want to do hardware hacking
| is to use a Z-wave garage door sensor and a smart hub that allows
| programmable alerts (like the Hubitat). Then you can set up a
| rule that alerts you if the door is open too long.
| awb wrote:
| MyQ (Chamberlin) also sells garage doors sensors for ~$20 I
| believe.
| vinay427 wrote:
| Yes, although their MyQ cloud platform unfortunately has a
| very transient reverse-engineered API due to the lack of an
| official option, AFAIK. This seems to be a regular issue for
| users that set up an integration between MyQ and a unified
| platform such as Home Assistant.
| xyst wrote:
| For non-native smart devices, this type of automation/monitoring
| could be implemented with a combination of "Bond Home" and Home
| Bridge (running on a raspberry pi). I have had success with
| connecting several dumb fans and lights and accessing them via
| the native HomeKit interface. Even the native iOS home kit
| automations work with it as well.
|
| I haven't tried it with a garage door, but I do see the home
| bridge community has built some plugins with some garage doors.
| riveducha wrote:
| If you want to control non-smart wireless home appliances, you
| can actually make the Raspberry Pi GPIO do it without the Bond
| Home.[1] It's a huge hack, to put it lightly.
|
| I don't think the OP is actually doing any sort of control
| though. I personally would recommend a Zigbee door sensor as
| part of a Zigbee + Home Assistant (open source) automation
| system which gives you the flexibility of not having to run
| wires and not having to write code to configure the
| automations.
|
| [1] https://riveducha.onfabrica.com/raspberry-pi-gpio-send-
| radio...
| na85 wrote:
| Raspberry Pis are great for this kind of DIY IOT hacking. I have
| a few that monitor my plants for soil moisture and alert me via
| IRC and Pushbullet when they get too dry.
| brainbag wrote:
| Sounds really cool, do you have a write up somewhere?
| na85 wrote:
| https://nathan.pro/raspi.html
|
| There's a link to my source code too. It's, uhh, pragmatic
| rather than elegant.
|
| Edit: I realize that this is a bit outdated because it
| references irssi-notifier, rather than Pushbullet. I will
| update the writeup.
|
| Edit edit: updated it!
| herodoturtle wrote:
| This is a great resource, thanks for sharing.
| void_mint wrote:
| I've contracted on two different IoT products for Global
| Fortune 100 companies whose field systems were just raspberry
| pis.
|
| They can take you really far.
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| Fun project but RPI is a big overkill for these types of
| projects. For example, an ESP32 can go into deep sleep and last
| _much_ longer on a battery.
| a10c wrote:
| Not sure a battery-operated device is even necessary here given
| powering a garage door motor requires significant power and
| therefore you're likely to have mains nearby.
| Smoosh wrote:
| I've been working on a similar project of my own. I've assembled
| the hardware and enough guides that I'm just about ready to put
| it together. My solution uses an ESP32 for control/wifi and
| MPU-6050 tilt sensors to measure how far open the doors are.
| xs wrote:
| I built one of these once. I even figure out a way to remotely
| trigger the garage door to close. I programmed it so that if I
| left it open for too long it'll message me telling me, and if I
| still stays open too long after that it'll be passive aggressive
| and say something like "I hate having to do all the work for you,
| but I closed your garage door because you forgot to."
| cloudking wrote:
| For Tesla Model 3/Y owners: one of the nice features of
| installing homelink, you can trigger the garage door open/close
| from your phone via the Tesla app.
| https://shop.tesla.com/product/model-3_y-automatic-garage-op...
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| yesimahuman wrote:
| Funny I started building my own project for this as well! One
| wall I hit was trying to have it send the radio signal to open or
| close the door, could never figure that out (using a 315mhz RF
| transmitter and an Arduino). Will take a look at this!
| simondotau wrote:
| Many garage door motors only accept a dumb trigger and don't
| have any mechanism for sending explicit "close" or "open"
| signals.
|
| I would avoid basic RF wherever possible; stick with a wired
| connection between the motor and your microcontroller, and use
| 802.11 wifi for communications. This is where the ESP32 (or
| ESP8266) makes perfect sense.
| jvolkman wrote:
| Mine only has the single trigger, but also has two limit
| switches at either side (it's a screw drive). I figured out
| that by flipping the limit switches I can control the
| direction of the door using just the single trigger button.
| E.g., if I short the open limit switch and send the door move
| signal, it will always close.
| yesimahuman wrote:
| Why do you say avoid RF? I was trying to create essentially a
| new "opener" button like the battery-powered ones that came
| with the motor. It's pretty old so I don't think it's doing
| anything too complicated security-wise. I do see wired being
| easier but I was driven to figure out RF. And yea I wouldn't
| be able to do a specific open/close event but the reed switch
| would tell me which state the door was in before sending the
| toggle signal
| _Anima_ wrote:
| For those not into hacking I use a Shelly 1 to control the garage
| door and aqara ZigBee contact sensor, controlled by home
| assistant.
| avh02 wrote:
| i tried another contact sensor (sonoff) before trying out the
| aqara/xiaomi sensors - holy crap what a world of difference in
| build quality and response time.
|
| I have one in our postbox flap to detect when we get mail - the
| sonoff needed 2-3 seconds to detect anything being open (and
| thus would miss the event) - and the flap being closed by then
| made it harder to send out the signal. The aqara's are almost
| instant and send out while the flap is lifted.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| If you're interested in this sort of thing, but lack the time for
| a hobby project, Chamberlain makes a somewhat-smart device that
| will do this for you (AND allow you to remotely open and close
| the door).
|
| We had a terrible problem leaving ours open, and I got one of
| these to help solve the problem. It's been pretty great, though
| it does require a phone app, network connectivity, and an account
| with Chamberlain. OTOH, it's HELLA cheap -- like $25.
|
| I don't know if Amazon links are okay here, but that's where I
| got mine. The item name there is "Chamberlain MyQ Smart Garage
| Hub - Wi-Fi enabled Garage Hub with Smartphone Control, Model
| MYQ-G0301".
| sjg007 wrote:
| It was on sale on prime for $16. The only issue will be "when"
| Chamberlain gets hacked and millions of garage doors open
| simultaneously.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| If someone could come up with a "Local Only" networking
| stamp, like how you see "Organic" on foods, I'm sure we could
| create a market for smart devices that don't reach out to a
| third party server.
| sjg007 wrote:
| I think the apple/z-wave is the counter trend with a
| privacy focus. The pressure from wifi IoT has forced the
| prices down though.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Very cool homebrew solution. If you need the feature but don't
| have time to homebrew it, Chamberlain has a piece of hardware
| (MyQ) for $30 (occasionally goes on sale for $17-$25) that
| enables you to poll garage door status and control it remotely
| using their app and API. Uses a sensor you attach to the garage
| door, talks using RF to the opener. Some lifter units even have
| this built in now.
|
| https://www.myq.com/
|
| https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B08GD3D9YJ/
| rhinoceraptor wrote:
| I highly dis-recommend this product, particularly if you want
| to use it with something like Home Assistant.
|
| First of all, their app usually takes about 30-60 seconds to
| load up which is pretty frustrating when you're waiting outside
| your garage and trying to get in, just waiting on a spinner as
| it has to go talk to some cloud server somewhere.
|
| Second, I use Home Assistant for pretty much everything, and
| Chamberlain has a habit of breaking their API every few months.
| From what I've gleaned they seem to change how they allowlist
| user-agent headers to try to intentionally break things like
| Home Assistant.
|
| Eventually I got tired of it constantly being slow and/or not
| working, and I threw it away. I replaced it with a programmable
| Z-Wave contact relay (Zooz ZEN16). It works much better now.
|
| Lastly, the newer Chamberlain motor units actually don't use
| simple push buttons anymore, so what I've done isn't even an
| option. I believe it's some kind of PWM over the wire to the
| wall-mounted buttons. I would recommend not buying any
| Chamberlain product because of their anti-consumer behavior.
| cryptoegorophy wrote:
| For myq if you have iPhone there are "short cuts" available
| to quickly open the door or close it, it is extremely fast
| and efficient. Their app is useless and only thing I use it
| for is for notifications if the door has been open for 5min+
| waswaswas wrote:
| I just timed it, and it took 4 seconds from opening the MyQ
| app to being able to open my garage door. The only time I
| experience the load times you're talking about is when I'm
| connected to my house WiFi far enough from the house that I
| don't really have any internet connection at all anyway.
|
| MyQ is probably the best $30 I've ever spent.
|
| I'm under no illusion that that APIs are appropriately
| handled, or that it's great for all workflows. But for me, it
| delivered the expected functionality, no RPi hacking
| required.
| twothamendment wrote:
| From what if seen, most modern openers have lost the ability
| for a simple button to open/close the door.
|
| If you solder, even just a little, you can attach a pair of
| wires to the board in the wall mounted button so you can
| control it from whatever project you are doing. I using pins
| on a pi to flip a relay and complete the circuit as if I
| pressed the button.
| rhinoceraptor wrote:
| Linus of Linus Tech Tips had a video [1] where he tried
| just that on a new Chamberlain opener with MyQ built in,
| and couldn't get it to work, the wires would act as
| antennas and trigger the door randomly, just from stray RF.
|
| The button panel for my ancient opener runs off of two
| wires, and each button is connected through a different
| value resistor, so I'm assuming the way it works is it
| measures the voltage drop to tell if you pressed the door
| or the light button. But, just connecting the two leads
| from the opener is enough to open or close the door, and I
| never use the built in bulbs on the opener anyways.
|
| 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7pSkVarixU
| quaffapint wrote:
| They also have a unit that I installed that you can tell it
| close when no one has been passed the sensor in x number of
| minutes. It has been great when we've forgotten to shut the
| door at night. No need to monitor anything yourself.
| glasss wrote:
| My fiance worked on the myQ team at Chamberlain. The app
| integrates with other home IoT devices as well, providing a
| single app to view / control a lot of the popular ones.
|
| We had 5 garage door openers in our apartment at the beginning
| of the work from home period for her testing.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Please send my compliments on the product. It Just Works, and
| I bought a bunch for everyone in my family.
| DannyBee wrote:
| MyQ works well with their stuff but is horrible for
| integration. Chamberlain deliberately changes the API every so
| often just to break folks. Sometimes it comes with a ridiculous
| excuse, sometimes not. They are up to v6 or v7 now. It is
| really because they want the companies (Samsung, Crestron,
| Control4) to pay them as well.
|
| Compare this with AladdinConnect that comes with the Genie
| lifts - they have broken people approximately zero times.
| bigiain wrote:
| > lets you check garage door status and control it remotely
| using their app and API.
|
| Presumably by bouncing everything through some anonymous
| Alibaba cloud ip addresses, effectively granting permission to
| the Chinese government to open your garage door whenever they
| like... :sigh:
|
| (Actually, it seems like its at least not completely awful,
| security wise: https://www.mcafee.com/blogs/other-blogs/mcafee-
| labs/we-be-j... )
| conductr wrote:
| I'm sure if China wants in my garage they can figure out a
| way with or without this device
|
| It's quite nice though. You can even have Amazon drop their
| packages inside the garage through some single use token or
| something. I for one have way too much value of tools and
| whatnot in my garage to grant that trust but I wish I could.
| [deleted]
| void_mint wrote:
| Would you feel better if they were AWS IPs?
| snypher wrote:
| At least they would have the recourse of law if something
| went wrong.
| [deleted]
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Was thinking this was an SDR project to let me know when my
| neighbourhood gets back from work even if I can't see them.
| tomschlick wrote:
| DIY IOT stuff is awesome. You can alternatively do this with a
| ~$12USD shelly 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEZUxXNiERQ
| canthonytucci wrote:
| https://opengarage.io/ does a similar thing
| michaelmcdonald wrote:
| Throwing my vote behind this. It's extremely slick! I haven't
| had any issues with it working or reporting correctly and it
| ties into Home Assistant quite nicely!
| sliken wrote:
| Have one, works great and doesn't depend on the cloud. Nice
| that it can tell the difference between door open/closed, and
| when closed it can tell if there's a car/truck present.
| thecal wrote:
| Seconded. I tried some of the consumer devices that ran over
| Z-Wave before OpenGarage. They worked fine but would invariably
| require a reset after a couple months. This meant I couldn't
| really rely on this and leave my keys at home. My OpenGarage
| unit has been super reliable for 2+ years.
| c_o_n_v_e_x wrote:
| "Soft Bypass function The Soft Bypass function allows me to over-
| ride the status of the hardware bypass switch when needed. When
| Soft Bypass is engaged, the bypass button's LED flashes to remind
| me Soft Bypass mode is enabled."
|
| These sort of things usually end in tragedy. I worked at a
| chemical plant that had an explosion where the safety systems
| (SIS) were bypassed. The engineers were trying to light off a
| boiler and were having trouble. The safety system had a 30 minute
| time delay between unsuccessful light off attempts to allow the
| fuel to disperse. The engineers bypassed the time delay and
| attempted multiple unsuccessful light offs in a row which flooded
| the boiler with fuel. Finally, it lit and went boom. Those near
| the equipment in the field were all killed.
|
| Hope you don't have any pets, children, or slow moving adults
| around.
| jrockway wrote:
| The "bypass" system seems to only suppress notifications about
| the door being open. This project doesn't appear to be coupled
| to any garage door control systems; it can't open or close the
| door, it can only report on the current state by ringing the
| doorbell or sending email. It seems that even if the system
| grossly malfunctions, you're left with a perfectly normal
| garage door opener. So the lecture about safety is probably not
| applicable here -- more likely is that the thing catches on
| fire, or gets the Google account banned after ignoring some
| rate limit.
| simondotau wrote:
| I added automation to my garage door, but not before
| calibrating (and carefully testing) the force limits on the
| motor, and installing (and carefully testing) an infrared
| trip sensor which integrates into the motor.
|
| When a garage door doesn't close when requested (or does open
| when not requested) it will spray notifications to everyone's
| phone, but it won't try to close the door again.
| t0mas88 wrote:
| You have this exact same thing with airplane engine starts. Add
| fuel at the wrong time and the whole thing either exceeds
| temperature limits and has to be completely taken apart or you
| cause a fire.
|
| The most common cause of destroyed engines is exactly like you
| describe for the boiler, it didn't start the first time and
| someone ignores the cooldown limits and/or cause of the failed
| start (e.g. not enough power in the batteries to get the
| turbine up to minimum speed before adding fuel, try again now
| with even less power because you used some on the first
| attempt)
| froh wrote:
| yes, naming is hard. the gadget is not a garage door control
| but purely a mgarage door monitor. so the so called bypass is
| purely related to the monitor. the garage door control, if any,
| with its safety features remains completely stand alone.
|
| that to me looks like an ok architecture from the safety pov,
| where the gadget behaves as an eye and maybe a finger pushing
| the control remote, so the safety is delegated to the garage
| control.
|
| to state the obvious, I'm fully with you that there should be
| no override bypass inactive whatever on any kind of safety
| sensor, and the sensor should always be fail safe, i.e. if a
| sensor fails the motor stops, if an electronics compinent
| fails, the motor stops, if not locked shut it should be
| possible to manually completely reopen the door, etc.
|
| obligatory pointer to Nancy Leveson http://sunnyday.mit.edu/
| djrogers wrote:
| > These sort of things usually end in tragedy. > Hope you don't
| have any pets, children, or slow moving adults around.
|
| What aspect of a garage door status monitor do you consider a
| safety item? This has nothing to do with the various safety
| systems built in to garage doors (IR sensors, pressure sensors,
| etc) - it just alerts the owner if they forgot to close the
| garage door. The bypass silences those reminders.
| zapbeeb wrote:
| 'ohd' monitors specified GPIO pins on a Raspberry Pi and responds
| based on changes to the status of those pins. It sends email (or
| SMS) messages to numbers in its config file.
| [deleted]
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-06-28 23:03 UTC)