Hi team, I’ve had some issues effectively monitoring my garage door and I’m thinking perhaps the best and simplest approach are some reed switches or something similar. The door is a sectional metal door that rolls back into the garage. Has anyone got any recommendations for sensors in this space?
For reference I’ve used a garadget, the heat here in Aus caused issues with the plastic mount, probably repairable but I’ve moved on. I also have a vision tilt sensor (ZG8101) which often just reports the wrong state.
I actually use two different kinds of sensors for two different doors. Both are the section doors as you are describing.
On one I use a zwave tilt sensor and I’ve never had any issues with it.
For the other one I use an ESP8266 NodeMCU with a connected HC-SR04 ultra sonic distance sensor mounted to the garage ceiling. Once the door is all the way open it blocks the sensor (measures less than 1 ft) and it indicates the door is open.
I use Fibaro Smart Implant with one input connected to reed switch sensor (for door state), second input with IR distance sensor as car presence detector and one output of Smart Implant connected to garage controller to trigger door closing/opening cycles. Works perfectly for over 2 years now.
I use an industrial reed switch specifically designed for garage doors. You can get them at plenty of places in Aus like altronics.com.au , jaycar.com.au or csd.com.au.
Mine is wired to an input on my alarm system which then communicates with HA via MQTT. You could easily use an ESP or whatever else to get it integrated to HA.
I’m using two Reed switches, one when gate is Open and one when is closed. So I know when something is blocking the gate, and when it’s not fully closed, and get instant info when it start Opening or closing. It’s connected to esp32, which I use also for openning the garage gate and monitoring temperature from this cheap xiaomi bluetooth sensors. It Worked perfectly for last year. Reed switches I mounted with hot glue.
For distance sensor I used SHARP GP2Y0A02YK - there are different variations of this sensor with different measurement distances. This model has 20~150cm effective operating range and is installed at ~2m above the ground on top of place where car roof is located when parked.
Setup requires dual voltage supply; 9~30V DC power supply for Fibaro FDBS-222 and 5V for GP2Y0A02YK distance sensor. I used separate 12V for Fibaro and 5V for distance sensor, as I have these readily available for other purposes in my garage.
On the chart below I shown wireing for usage with single Smart Implant. In my actual installation I have 2 garage doors, so used one 2 SI for each door sensors/external butttons and one for distance sensors (I installed distance sensors later). When I did my implementation with original OWZ integration it was not possible to configure SI protection parameters, which was causing inputs and outputs being linked (acting as a switch), so to keep garage door sensor separate from garage controller output I had to use IN1 and OUT2 only respectively. So I’m not 100% sure if full functionality is possible to be achieved now with single SI. There is however separate thread on forum, where one user confirmed that with Zwave JS it is possible to change protection parameters and disassociate inputs from outputs, so in theory setup from diagram below is now possible.
Hey @sparkydave - I bought this same one off Amazon. For the life of me, I can not figure out how to attach it to my garage door. The wires and the ESP are set, I just have no idea how to attach this. Could you potentially send a picture? Thanks so much!
