Car detection in garage

Im trying to find something that will easily detect a car is in the garage to then send a trigger to the door controller to close the door.

Im currently opening the door via geofencing entering gome zone in HA. This is working well.

Im after something to then trigger the close the door when parked or when car has exited garage.

I was.looking into ibeacon, but i cant use a usb adaptor in HA as hyperv soes not support usb pass through.

Any ideas appreciated

Welcome Tes8080!

You might want to consider the following:

  1. mmWave sensor where the “field of view” or motion boundaries can be clearly defined to detect only the car.
  2. a photo cell / beam where you can detect if the beam is broken or clear
  3. a load-cell sensor where the weight of the car on a mat triggers the presence of the car.

Full disclaimer: I have no experience using any of these devices with Home Assistant. But the above list should let you search for a potential solution.

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Someone did what you want and documented their steps here.

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I use something very similar and it works great for detecting if my car is in the garage or not.

@Tes8080 - you just might want to be careful with closing the garage automatically. While the door will not close all the way while something is blocking it - assuming the sensors all work correctly - it can leave a nasty scratch on your vehicle or worse.

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I use an ultrasonic sensor. Simple, cheap and effective.

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For years I use Sharp IR distance sensor (it provides output voltage proportional to distance to obstacke) connected to analog input of fibaro smart implant to measure this voltage. I guess newer shelly Uni Plus also has capability to measure input voltage. Sensor is hanged over the parking place, so it measures either the distance to garage floor of roof of the car.

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Cars are usually still enough when they are parked that they won’t be noticed by the mmWave sensor.
Unless you kidnapped someone that is in the trunk

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I was thinking of how to detect a car moving into or out of a very specific location instead of a general purpose motion detector that will detect any movement.

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Breaking an IR beam then?

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That was my #2 suggestion from above.

Ah, yes, it was, but I made the suggestion in the light of the new context OP provided (which is now more specific). Some of the prior suggestion were about static detections.

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Could it sense movement there (inside steel container with some gaps)?

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Not entirely on topic but since you mentioned not being able to do USB passthrough I would bring your attention to other Hypervisors that do support this. I use HA on VMware Workstation which fully supports USB device passthrough to the guest OS in this case HA. I have both a z-wave and zigbee dongle along with the Host OS built-in Bluetooth adaptor passing through to HA and the VM is set to autostart in the background when the mini PC boots up. It’s been a very stable solution. So you need not be limited just because you’re running a VM on windows.

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