[Thomas]’ garage door opener is a big old industrial unit, so he doesn’t have the convenience of a remote-controlled garage door opener. Obviously, this would get annoying after a while, so [Thomas] decided to build an Ethernet enabled relay board so he can open his door with his iPhone.
The build is based around an ATMega328 and a neat little Ethernet controller from Microchip. There are two relays on the board that connect to the Up and Down buttons on the door opener. The board receives UDP packets with instructions like, ‘RELAY 2 ON’ and the door responds accordingly.
Building just one of his boards cost [Thomas] the meager sum of $43. Considering the new Arduino Ethernet board costs around $60, we’re thinking he did a good job here. From the video after the break, we’re seeing that [Thomas] has to hold the button on his iPhone down for the door to go up. We see a few more pins on his AVR, so perhaps v.2 of his board could contain a few headers to attach sensors. Still, it’s a very nice build.