I know this has come up before, but I don’t see anything terribly recent…
I’d like to buy a garage door opener. It seems a lot of them now come WiFi enabled. Great. But I don’t want to depend on some manufacturer’s cloud, nor do I want to pay a subscription.
I’ll happily buy a non-WiFi model, stick a door sensor on it and tap into the open/close switch so I can control it through HA.
But it would be nice to find one which came with similar functionality out of the box. In fact Zigbee would be even better than WiFi.
You can build your own quite easily with a MIMOlite I/O (or other similar devices) where you run the switch wires to the terminals on the garage door opener and then the open/close sensor into the sensor.
I have a dumb garage door made smart quite simply with my MIMO.
Yeah, I guess that’s what I’ll end up doing. Seems a shame to have to build my own, since the WiFi versions of the openers at the big-box stores are only a few bucks more than the “dumb” ones. I was hoping there might be one which works with HA out of the box.
OTOH, I’m a tinkerer by nature. It’ll be fun to set up.
All of the manufacturer’s smart opener implementations are cloud based.
Liftmaster/Chamberlain recently blocked all non-partner third party access, including HA’s. There is a third party control board for LM/Chamberlain called ratgdo that allows local control with a simple three wire connection. Ratgdo with LM/Chamberlain gives the best local experience by far, but the community consensus is no one should buy LM/Chamberlain due to the way they have blocked access. I’m on the fence about that. If it weren’t for the way they’ve handled the situation I would have replaced my Genie openers just to get ratgdo functionality.
Genie and Linear(maybe others) both have HA integrations available, but are cloud based.
For non LM/Chamberlain - Genie, Linear, and just about anyone else, there are plenty third party local options without full DIY. One kit reasonably priced with good reviews is the Meross MSG100HK or MSG200HK (1 or 2 doors). They expose the doors and operate 100% locally to HA via homekit. Konnected.io has another well reviewed kit, but seems pricey to me. But there are plenty of other options out there.
OK, I’ve settled on a “dumb” opener. There’s a low-end Genie at the big box home improvement stores which should do the trick.
I like the looks of that Memos stuff, although I’d want to figure out what “color” the learn button is before buying the opener. Also the Konnected line looks pretty robust, albeit pricy. Interesting that they use an optical laser sensor to detect the open door. I like that it’s ESP-based, too.
Unfortunately for me the Zigbee mesh is much stronger where I’m putting this door than WiFi, so it may be back to a roll-my-own solution.
That’s really only an issue with LM/Chamberlain. Genie (and all others AFAIK) toggles the door with a simple, dumb, button press, so any dry relay solution should work for control, combined with a reed switch, or vibration sensor should work.
On my two Genie doors I used a two channel dry contact relay. For door position I tested two options. One one I used an Aqara door contact sensor mounted on a free swinging hinge. On the other I used an Aqara vibration sensor to sense door position. Both work well enough that I’ve never bothered to go back and make both doors use the same method. Wrap it up in a Cover Template and it all works.
I have an Aqara vibration sensor (AQ1) that supports both tilt and vibration but the tilt doesn’t show as an entity in ZHA (for some reason it’s not supported in ZHA). But the vibration sensor works great. I use it for indicating that my clothes dryer is running or not.
and you can get a tilt sensor without it having a vibration sensor. As in my zwave tilt sensor.
So vibration doesn’t always equal tilt in all vibration sensors. Even in Aqara sensors. They are two different functions.
I don’t think I would want to use a vibration sensor for a garage door. How is it supposed to know the orientation of the door?
So I guess my point was to use a tilt sensor instead of a vibration sensor. But if your vibration sensor also has a tilt sensor then that would work too. Just don’t use the vibration part of it.
I’m not finding a lot of Zigbee tilt sensors on line. I’m wondering if it might be easier to use a “regular” door/window sensor which uses the magnet and reed switch approach. I assume I’d have to find a place where two parts come very close together, perhaps where the arm which pulls the door reaches the end of the track. I’m not sure if the tolerances on the door itself would be close enough for those little sensors to work there.
The axis entities are exposed in z2m. IIRC, axis data was available via zha_event in ZHA? But I haven’t had one paired with ZHA for over a year, so may be wrong.
Instead of tilt sensors, I use one of these instead, I glued it to the garage floor on one side, then ran the wire to the MIMO’s contact sensor and it’s worked great for 20 years, only issue I ever had is when I knocked the bracket loose and had to re-secure it.
Seems like the Aqara T2 relay module would be a similar solution to RATGDO (which is currently on backorder)
I’ve got two chamberlains (MyQ) installed already and I think the Aqara T2 might be a solution here. I think…it can be used with a standard zigbee hub vs it having to be an Aqara specific hub, but I’m still researching that.
I actually found this thread while searching the pros and cons of the RATGDO vs the Aqara T2.
Also, another solution (that I believe will control up to 3 doors) is Tailwind.