Relay controller to open and close my garage door
Our house came with a couple of garage door openers. They're bulky though so we would like to open and close our garage door with our phones. The garage door brand is Liftmaster and it actually supports myQ, Liftmaster's proprietary home automation platform. I played around with it and soon realized you need their 828LM internet gateway to connect the garage door opener to their myQ cloud. I'm trying to not use proprietary home automation clouds if possible.
The wall controller is a 882LM and it has a simple push button switch with 12V going in.
If the garage door is triggered by a simple momentary switch, then that's where I can hook into from the outside. I soldered two wires to the right side pins of SW1 similar to here (I forgot to take a picture of that). I was uncertain whether I could wire this switch up to the Raspberry Pi directly. At first I thought about following what that person did but then I saw that they're using a WiFi switch that requires a particular app. I'd like to integrate it with my home automation system. I got a "2 Channel DC 5V Relay Module with Optocoupler Low Level Trigger". and connected C and NC with the wires coming from the switch. The relay is then triggered by the Raspberry Pi.
A simple REST API brings it together and is used to integrate it with the home automation system. I use Home Assistant and a REST API can be integrated like this (configuration.yaml)
rest_command:
toggle_garage_door:
url: 'http://<the-host>:<the-port>/garage/trigger'
method: 'post'
script:
toggle_garage_door:
sequence:
- service: rest_command.toggle_garage_door
I started out with a Raspberry Pi hosting a Flask API but soon found that while it did what I wanted it to do, it was overkill for the job. I built the same functionality for the ESP8266 and it works just as well for a fraction of the price.
See Raspberry PI/ for the Python solution running on the Raspberry and ESP8266/ for the C version running on the ESP8266.