automatic garage door opener

5 Articles

Garage Door Controller Gets The IoT Treatment

April 13, 2021 by 23 Comments

[TheStaticTurtle] built a custom controller for automating his garage doors. He wanted to retain the original physical button and RF remote control interfaces while adding a more modern wireless control accessible from his internet connected devices. Upgrading an old system is often a convoluted process of trial and error, and he had to discard a couple of prototype versions which didn’t pan out as planned. But luckily, the third time was the charm.

The original door-closer logic was pretty straightforward. Press a button and the door moves. If it’s not going in the desired direction, press the button once again to stop the motor, and then press it a third time to reverse direction. With help from the user manual diagrams and a bit of reverse-engineering, he was able to get a handle on how to plan out his add-on controller to interface with the old system.

There are many micro-controller options available these days when you want to add IoT to a project, but [TheStaticTurtle] decided to use the old faithful ESP8266 as the brains of his new controller. For his add-on board to work, he needed to detect the direction in which the motor was turning, and detect the limit switches when the door reached end of travel in either direction. Finally, he needed a relay contact in parallel with the activation button to send commands remotely.

To sense if the motor was moving in the “open” or “close” direction, he used a pair of back-to-back opto-couplers in parallel with the motor terminals. He connected another pair of opto-couplers across the two end-limit switches which indicated when the door was fully open or closed, and shut off the motor supply. Finally, a GPIO from the ESP8266 actuates a relay to send the door open and close commands. The boards were designed in EasyEDA and with a quick turnaround from China, he was able to assemble, test and debug his boards pretty quickly.

The code was written using the Arduino IDE and connects the ESP8266 to the MQTT server running on his home automation computer. The end result is a nice dashboard with three icons for open, close and stop, accessible from all the devices connected to his home network. A 3D printed enclosure attaches outside the original control box to keep things tidy. Using hot melt glue as light pipes for the status LED’s is a pretty nifty hack. If you are interested in taking a deeper look at the project, [TheStaticTurtle] has posted all resources on his Github repository.

IoT Garage Door Opener From Scrap

November 15, 2017 by 6 Comments

[Hans Nielsen] has a couple roommates, and his garage has become a catch-all for various items. And like any good hacker’s garage, it boasts an IoT controlled garage door opener. It had a problem though, it used a Particle Photon – a popular IoT board that required internet access and a web server to operate. So [Hans] raided his roommate’s spare parts bin and set-forth to rebuild it!

One of his main goals was to make something that did not require internet access to operate. Anyone connected to the local WiFi should be able to open and close the door via a web interface, and he would give our good friend [Linus Torvalds] a call to make it happen. The key component in the build is the C.H.I.P SBC that made the news a while back for being ridiculously cheap.

Be sure to check out [Han’s] blog if you’re at all interested in working with the C.H.I.P. He does a fantastic job of documenting the ins and outs of getting a project like this working.

IOT Startup Bricks Customers Garage Door Intentionally

April 5, 2017 by 201 Comments

Internet of Things startup Garadget remotely bricked an unhappy customer’s WiFi garage door for giving a bad Amazon review and being rude to company reps. Garadget device owner [Robert Martin] found out the hard way how quickly the device can turn a door into a wall. After leaving a negative Amazon review, and starting a thread on Garadget’s support forum complaining the device didn’t work with his iPhone, Martin was banned from the forum until December 27, 2019 for his choice of words and was told his comments and bad Amazon review had convinced Garadget staff to ban his device from their servers.

The response was not what you would expect a community-funded startup. “Technically there is no bricking, though,” the rep replied. “No changes are made to the hardware or the firmware of the device, just denied use of company servers.” Tell that to [Robert] who can’t get into his garage.

This caused some discontent amoung other customers wondering if it was just a matter of time before more paying customers are subjected to this outlandish treatment. The Register asked Garadget’s founder [Denis Grisak] about the situation, his response is quoted below.

 It was a Bad PR Move, Martin has now had his server connection restored, and the IOT upstart has posted a public statement on the matter.– Garadget

This whole debacle brings us to the conclusion that the IoT boom has a lot of issues ahead that need to be straightened out especially when it comes to ethics and security. It’s bad enough to have to deal with the vagaries of IoT Security and companies who shut down their products because they’re just not making enough money. Now we have to worry about using “cloud” services because the people who own the little fluffy computers could just be jerks.

YAGDO – Yet Another Garage Door Opener

March 25, 2016 by 19 Comments

It seems like every few months we cover another garage door opener, and the concept is quickly becoming the “Hello World” of DIY home automation. In this installment, reader [ray] made his own garage door opener and chose the ESP8266 as the wireless interface of choice, but spiced the application up with an ultrasonic sensor that detects whether the car is in the garage and a web app that shows history, plus integration with Blynk for remote access. For posterity, he made the project open source as well.

The video is well produced with lots of details and instructions, and the circuit board and assembly are refined and clean. It may be a “Hello World”, but it’s done right.

Some of the other garage door hacks we’ve covered in the last year include the fingerprint scanner opener, the IM-ME opener, the motion-based security opener, the cat-enabled opener, the OpenCV Pi opener, and a Bluetooth Low Energy opener.

Continue reading “YAGDO – Yet Another Garage Door Opener” →

Automatic garage door opener

Blink Thrice To Let Me In

April 8, 2015 by 52 Comments

Now here’s a really cool home hack. [Luis Rodrigues] has automated his garage door to open, simply by flashing his headlights at it.

But wait, doesn’t that mean anyone could break into his house? Nope. At first we thought he had just added some photo-sensors and a bit of computer logic in order to turn a pattern of lights into an output to open the garage, but no, it’s actually specific to his car only. Which is awesome because if anyone ever tried to copy him to break in, all they break into is a very confused state of mind.

You see how it actually works is the headlight output is connected to a control box under the hood of his car. A Moteino (RF Arduino variant) reads the input signal of the headlights flashing three times, and then communicates wirelessly to the garage door in order to open it.

But [Luis] also has a gate outside his property — so if you hold the lights on for a second, both the garage door and the external gate will open as well.

Continue reading “Blink Thrice To Let Me In” →