I have read many threads on here about how to use a relay to open & close a garage door. I plan on setting this up soon, but I want to take this a step further and have the garage door automatically open when I get home (it will also be nice to automatically close it when I leave).
So I was wondering what you guys have used for a project like this. I am trying to figure out the best way to determine proximity to the house without killing my cell phone battery so I am thinking about using the Wifi connection to my phone. I don’t really want to use a ping app because I feel like that would create too much network traffic. Any thoughts on this?
There are some other situations that I am trying to overcome. I think I mainly need help figuring out my logic.
[ul][li]How does the ping app work? Does it cause any network issues?[/li]
[li]I use Android and my wife uses iPhone. It seems like I can set up Tasker on my Android to trigger a scene based upon my phone connecting to my Wifi network. The problem I have with this is the “what if” my phone disconnects from my network and then reconnects (this seems to happen occasionally overnight for some reason)? Also, how can I do something like this on the iPhone?[/li]
[li]We have a 2-car garage with 2 separate doors. I want the system to know which car is approaching regardless of who the driver is or if we are together. How can this be done?[/li]
[li]When leaving the house, I would like the door to close (or start closing) while it is still within sight. What is the best trigger for this?[/li][/ul]
Again, I think I just need help thinking through the logic for some of these things and I just wanted to get some ideas from how some of you guys have your systems set up. I appreciate your help!
Opening the right garage door for one of the cars despite who is sitting in the car means you must ditch the smartphones and somehow use the cars themselves as triggers. Maybe you could add some presence device like the (AEO_PANIC). Its a small remote more or less. Maybe there could be a script which opens the garagedoor #1 when the (AEO_PANIC) returns into the z-wave mesh and closes it ones it leaves the mesh.
I like the sound of that, but what type of distance beyond my house will the Z-wave mesh encompass? The way that I would like for this to work is that the vehicle is sensed a few hundred feet away from the house so that by the time everything is triggered, the door has enough time to fully open before the car pulls into the driveway. I know my WiFi network gives me an ideal area for this.
I have been considering leaving old android devices in each vehicle to do exactly what you are saying. The only issue with this is that I would want to hook them up to a 12 volt source that is only on when the vehicle is running (to prevent draining the car battery if the vehicle sits for awhile). However, being old devices, I don’t expect great battery life from them, so if their batteries get fully drained and they turn off, they would require manual intervention to turn them back on. This is no good because my goal would be to place them in an ‘out of the way’ location.
get something like this: HobbyKing Micro UBEC 3A / 5v
Hook it up to your cars battery/cigarette lighter plug/permanent power source. Doesn’t draw too much power. gives you 5V out whatever input it gets (6-23V i think) A car in normal condition shouldn’t even bother about this small power draw. In my oppinion. SO when using old android devices you can go back to tasker triggering with GEoFencing or IP pinging … But keep in mind default WLAN scan interval in android is set to 60s. SO in worst case the phone will need 59s to log in the wifi once in range.
I would recommend against this auto-opening plan. It is a Rube Goldberg-esque solution which presents many challenges and countless opportunities for failure. Almost all of the solutions listed, or that I can think of, will have issues with inaccuracy, false triggers, non-triggers, dangers of unattended operation… The issues are range, accuracy, security, reliability.
If I had a customer that insisted on an auto-open solution, I would propose RFID readers in the driveway(embedded loop) or at the garage door(overhead patch) with RFID tags in/on the car. The readers would have to have several feet of range, but they would also need to be highly directional to only open the correct door and to prevent false triggers when the vehicle is inside the garage. It’s the only reliable and safe method, that I can think of.
Perhaps these might work if the cross-lane reading is prevented like they claim and in-garage operation is avoided. The car approaches a particular door, that door’s reader identifies(authorizes) that vehicle and opens that door. You would not want the system to activate if the cars are already inside the garage, or as the neighboring vehicle enters or exits, or if the vehicle is sitting in the driveway and not trying to enter. The issue is cost. Such an RFID system would cost thousands of dollars, then you would have to integrate it with Vera.
Optical scanners are sometimes used for gate access to communities or toll collection. Those systems rely on a barcode sticker in on the window, but they are highly susceptible to counterfeiting/fraud and I would never trust my home to such an insecure system.
Unless you have a long private driveway that would allow you to mount yor RFID system pretty far from the garage, I think it is far better and more cost effective to use a standard garage door opener with its standard in-car remote to manually activate the door(of the driver’s choice) on demand. You can then trigger house activity based on the door opening and/or a geofenced phone or pinger.
You could also setup a geofenced phone or pinger to activate lights and so forth while leaving the more dangerous and security sensitive matters of opening the door to manual operation. If lights and cooling set points are erroneously operated there is no real danger or security issue.
The question is, is it really necessary that those doors open/close with NO human interaction? It is just a huge security issue for your property if something goes wrong. If I were you, I would stick to the usual garage door opener remote in the car and open the door when drinving up to the door. This way you can be sure
nobody slips in before you reach the gate / slips in when you leave
gate opening is less than 15 secs usual
much cheaper
no danger of kids or ppl getting hit by moving gate coz nobody actually supervises the gate/door
Or if you insist on Zwave you can still get two small zwave remotes as I posted earlier and put one in each car to operate the gate with a zwave remote. But that would need some relays and switches being installed on the garage motor. Other zwave remote I found is ZME_KFOB2-SC Maybe it is not availible in US, I am from germany.
Thanks for the feedback on this. Definitely some good points against doing the fully-automatic opening. I just thought it would be really cool and I was hoping that someone figured out how to do it in a way that took out all of the risks.
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