It’s not that you can only pair with the device while inside the garage, you need to physically push a button on the device to put it into pairing mode.

You could always bruteforce the phone’s BD_ADDR to spoof your way in, but anyone who wanted in that badly would probably just go with a crowbar. :P

“Someone could sniff your bluetooth hardware adress, spoof it, then gain access to your garage!!! MWAHAHAHA”

or they could like, punch out a window, steal your tv, and skip the garage altogether. Most home security measures are most easily bypassed by thieves and home invaders by simply ignoring them, punching out windows is just too darn easy.

Take for example lockpicking – lockpicking commercial locks is frighteningly easy, you could learn to do it in maybe 5 minutes – but why bother? Lockpicks are hard to find, take effort to use, and generally add time to theft sentences, so why bother when a tire iron works just as well?

On another note, I doubt commercial garage door openers are super to secret encrypted impossible to dupe, so this is probably better than the stock solution, and a cool simple hack to boot.

Why is it that when someone posts a simple solution for something it either uses something expensive or has such an impractical way of building the solution….

“Why is it that when someone posts a simple solution for something it either uses something expensive or has such an impractical way of building the solution….”

This isn’t necessarily that expensive. I have had at least two BT headsets where the audio went bad. It connects and does everything, but sounds like crap to talk on. Would be fine for this situation.

Except lots of them don’t work when plugged into a charger (I think), so I guess you would have to replace the battery with a power source…

@fartface
I like this solution – I ride my bycycle to work and don’t like to carry keys. So I leave a garage door open in the bottom of my my bike bag. Alternatively I could set my phone to auto-connect to the headset – when I get close it would open and when I get too far away it would beep again and close. I love it.

I use my garage as a shop, this is fantastic. I’ve been looking for a way to have a garage door opener on me at all times without having a garage door opener on me at all times.

For all the haters, this is exactly what I’ve been looking for.

“Why is it that when someone posts a simple solution for something it either uses something expensive or has such an impractical way of building the solution”

If you look up the headset he’s talking about, it’s less than $15, plus the $1 transistor (Radio Shack price; sure it’s cheaper online).

Plus, he even wrote an app (already in the Android Market) to do the connect/disconnect for you by pressing one button.

This is a super-easy, super-cheap solution that doesn’t even modify your existing setup.

Am I the only one who actually watched the video all the way through?

Wow. That was a great video explaining everything. This could be very useful for people who need to retrofit an old garage opener for a remote.

I wonder if you could get something that would open your door when your bluetooth device came into range (but not trigger when leaving range).

Although I don’t know squat about electronic engineering, the idea seems very unique in that it personalizes the mobile phone as a door opener eliminating the need for a second transmitter to the door. I think it would go over with the masses. Keep going, and I hope you make a huge $$$$$$ from the idea.

I hope this is not one of the headsets that goes bananas when the internal battery is dead. I know it’s on a charger but the battery will die and I’ve seen a few headsets that will not work properly if the battery is dead even plugged in.

Here’s the thing about picking this apart on the basis of security… You know where 99% of interior garage door “open” buttons are mounted? Immediately beside the door, which has a flimsy seal and a minimum of 3/4″ clearance. Most garage security can be defeated by a simple ruler. Press on the edge of the door to open the gap a bit, look for the lit button, swipe at it with the ruler, and immediately jump back.

…or you could sit across the street for hours with a laptop and a directional antenna, hoping to catch the right traffic. Take your pick.

Interesting .. but the only real issue I see is that it works off the ‘beep’ spike.

Any noise that is generated by the phone-headset will result in that spike also…

Would be a real bummer to use this, and be pulling into the garage with your car and have a connection-related spike (I know my headsets all have BT issues with random noise and freakish connections) and have it reverse and set the door down on your car.

It simply needs a bit more circuitry in order to ‘latch’ the single Beep tone…

as someone who works in the garage door industry, for the #1 company in that industry… I dont know why the hell we arent jumping on this and building this into our openers now.

@ Justin…because then the industry won’t be able to sell me a $3 electronic device for $40 the next time I trade in the car…