I am looking for some ideas here. My wife and I were discussing the garage the other day. We still have the tried and true tennis ball hanging down so she knows where to stop and can close the garage door behind her. For myself, it is not such an issue because I back into the garage and have a backup camera.
However, she was asking is there something that could be done with the automation that would get rid of the tennis ball? It got me to thinking since the garage door is on the Z-Wave network all I would need is some way to detect the vehicle’s position, trigger a light so she would know she was far enough in and then close the garage door.
The problem is I don’t know of any kind of Z-Wave enabled beam/laser trip sensor. Door/Window sensors would have to be exceptionally close and motion sensors would have too wide of a field of view.
Any ideas out there on how one might set up such a thing and what would be needed?
If not OpenGarage and you like to tinker a little bit I would go with EspEasy, and one/two distance sensors in front and one above - use the one above on change to start first timer every second to read position and control a led (or more), and a second timer to stop reading it. If a change is detect on timer 1 run, reset second timer.
I am building right now something similar, but also with 2 ir distance sensors as backup (they area read in paralel with the ultrasonic ones and if the difference is too much, blink warning led) in case something goes wrong with the ultrasonic distance sensors - 2 extra sensors are cheaper than a new car part
