A few years ago, [Lou] came up with a pretty clever build to open his garage door with his phone. He simply took a Bluetooth headset, replaced the speaker with a transistor, and tied the transistor to a few wires coming out of his garage door opener. When the Bluetooth headset connected, the short beep coming from the speaker output opened the door.
The newest version of this build does away with the simple Bluetooth headset and replaces it with a Bluetooth 4.0 chip. The reason for this is that Apple and their walled garden of an App store would never allow a Samsung Bluetooth headset to be used with one of their iDevices.
The latest build is just about as simple as using a Bluetooth headset. A board that appears to use TI’s CC2540 chip is attached to the garage door opener with a few passives and a transistor. Pairing the new circuit with a phone is as simple as shorting a pair of pins, and the new iOS app does exactly what it should – opens a garage door at the press of a non-button.
While it’s not something that can be put together with scraps from a junk drawer, it’s still an extremely simple solution to opening a garage door with a phone. Video below.
Awesome. I’ve been playing with the nrf51822 at the moment and it’s been brilliant.
Why on earth is it a problem pairing a Samsung BT-Headset to an iPhone?! BT headset-profile is standardised, and i have never had any problems pairing stuff across different brands …
From how I heard the video, it wasn’t a problem with pairing, but rather a problem with getting the big A to approve an app which relied on their most bitter rivals hardware. They also cite longer range, and better customizability as reasons for the switch
Well that’s just nonsense – I’ve hooked up umpteen BT audio devices to my iDevices without fail.
Now if it’s just to use Bluetooth LE, that’s a whole different reason! Let’s just hope you’re running an iPhone 4S or better though!
Actually Apple has locked down Bt on IOS devices. I am very sure that most headsets work just fine but anything custom is under their thumb.
BLE is more open for now.
Of course he could have just used wifi.
Wifi makes the security trickier, not impossible, but not trivial either.
I don’t get why the app store comes into it at all – surely he is just going to install his own app locally on the device using a dev licence?
Can anyone comment on how secure pairing is with bluetooth 4.0? Seems like the security is 100% dependent on how secure pairing is. How hard would it be to someone with a $15 software defined radio (SDR) to fake a MAC address or just use a replay attack to open the garage door?
if i buy the TI’s CC2540 chip will i need a special firmware to make it work? or its work out of the box