Garage Door Sensor

[jackwan1 (Jack wan)]

Hi all,
I know this subject has been discussed like:

How to set up custom garage door sensor

I have a Garage Door Zigbee sensor which acts as a tilt sensor. (x, y, z axis) What I am trying to do is create a “virtual” sensor that is open / close based on z-axis value. If z-axis is > 200 then garage door = open else garage door = closed. How do I accomplish this? I have tried to create a custom “cover” sensor in configuration.yaml but it does not appear to work properly. I only want to know if the garage door is open or closed. The sensor I have is an Aeotec Zigbee Multipurpose sens…

But I am a total newbe in Home Assistant, just installed the server on my Ubuntu using docker.
I have many IOT devices, including Shelly and others, I saw HA has find all those devices and sensors. I am using Shelly to open and close the garage door, in addition, I have installed reed sensors so Shelly will report the status of the door.
I do see a sensor on HA as “Garage Door Input Status” which is the reed sensor status from Shelly. I also can see in the HA log book the status of the door(running or cleared). I want to take the status to inform me by HA. I normally use prowl to provide status.

This is my first project with HA, so bear with me for a newbe. Questions:

1. Do I have to insert commends in yaml to have notifications sent to me? Or if there is a canned scene in HA that I can use to send notifications? In Shelly app, I just have to configure a scene to receive notifications, I am using Shelly cloud, NOT MQTT.
2. If #1 is not possible Which yaml and where I should insert yaml programs if I am using Docker HA?
3. I saw a lot of templates in the forum for garage sensors, but I did not see that sends out notifications on actions. Am I missing some thing?
4. I know yaml programs needs to be formatted, had a lot of problem with docker compose, which yaml editor is best for HA.
5. I know the Docker HA does not provide HA add-ons, you have to hunt for it, should I reinstall it with HA OS? I was able to install HACS nevertheless.