Automatic Garage Door

Posted on
Wed Feb 07, 2018 1:36 am
MarcoGT offline
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Joined: Sep 11, 2014
Location: Germany

Automatic Garage Door

Hi all,

my father already has an automatic garage door using a simple Fibaro Switch.
The idea is now to make a little bit more "automatic".

- Garage door shall open itself when the car is coming (raspberrypi in the garage + beacon in the car?). raspberrypi already working inside the house for presence monitoring
- Garage door shall close itself, and this is the most tricky part; I shall combine beacons of auto and of house keys to detect presence.

Uhm, not so easy to cover all use cases.

Posted on
Wed Feb 07, 2018 8:39 am
Colorado4Wheeler offline
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Re: Automatic Garage Door

Sounds like simple Geofencing would do the trick. You could do that with IFTTT or even with HomeKit automation. Now if you are talking about actual presence detection in the house then the beacon might be an option or if it's just one person you could use motion sensors to achieve that as well. I have pretty good in-house presence detection with two people using motion sensors strategically.

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Posted on
Wed Feb 07, 2018 11:22 pm
MarcoGT offline
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Joined: Sep 11, 2014
Location: Germany

Re: Automatic Garage Door

Colorado4Wheeler wrote:
Sounds like simple Geofencing would do the trick. You could do that with IFTTT or even with HomeKit automation. Now if you are talking about actual presence detection in the house then the beacon might be an option or if it's just one person you could use motion sensors to achieve that as well. I have pretty good in-house presence detection with two people using motion sensors strategically.


You are right, I forgot to mention geofencing.
We also tried it, but because of how roads are located, when you driving on a parallel road, the door will be opened; using HomeRemote on iOS, 30m radius seems too large :(

Posted on
Thu Feb 08, 2018 12:08 pm
Colorado4Wheeler offline
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Re: Automatic Garage Door

Have you tried IFTTT and HomeKit? With IFTTT I don't get super accurate Geo, but on HomeKit it's pretty decent and maybe that would be close enough for you. You could also combo them to have a motion sensor positioned such that coming into the drive AND a Geofence would kick it in. I use something similar for knowing when someone is approaching the door, by trial and error getting my motion sensor tuned to just a particular spot (which you can also do with SecuritySpy's motion sensing zones and I've done that too).

For me, my Geofencing never sacrifices security in a way that says if I enter a radius then anything in my house becomes less secure (unlock something, open something) but the reverse is true, if I exit a Geo zone it will lock and secure things and it won't let me use Siri to unlock or open things unless I'm within a certain Geo zone.

It almost sounds like you need multiple things to all ring true for the condition to pass. Without trying to figure out how to do Pi's and in-car "things". you could also throw a beacon into the mix that uses MAC addresses and/or IP addresses if your WiFi is strong enough to reach to the edge of the property.

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HomeKit Bridge | Device Extensions | Security Manager | LCD Creator | Room-O-Matic | Smart Dimmer | Scene Toggle | Powermiser | Homebridge Buddy

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