Domo Domo

Garage doors are a big deal when a mistaken open means precious seconds waiting in the sub zero outdoors.

Current problems with my garage door…

• I don’t know if the doors open or closed.  I have no line of sight, so I often close the door when it’s open, or am uncertain if I had really opened it.
• My remote sucks and sometimes the signal is too weak to open the garage door, and I have to walk outside to do it.
• Sometimes I just plain forget after I’ve already walked outside and left the remote locked in the house.

Once I get better at this electronics thing, I’d like to setup a rig that:

• Opens or closes the garage door via an iPhone formatted web page
• Checks the current open/close status of the door and posts that to the web page

I think I could take an existing remote and just mount it right by the opener unit, and then interface this with an arduino or similar and add some basic wifi.  Extending a wifi signal to the garage should not be a problem.  I’d also have to somehow have to get the open/close status somehow.  I can either add my own sensor to do this, or somehow get this data from the opener which must somehow know.

I see that this kind of thing has been done before, but it uses X10, which is expensive and not as much fun as figuring it out myself.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 10th, 2010 at 1:13 pm and is filed under Project Ideas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.