Ideas wanted: Detect presense of A car in my garage

Hardware
21

I use opengarage so have been using ultrasonic for a very long time. I dont get an issue with false feedback. To give you an idea on accuracy, have a look at the stability,

Door

You can see car briefly out at the start, car in for most of it, and then car out again, followed by 1 reading where it picked up the garage door open (it’s covered by the panel lift door when open).

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22

Same here. There’s a thread around here I followed to build my own. Was like $8 in Chinese parts. Been absolutely rock solid for three years.

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23

Garages usually use an ultra sonic sensor bounced off the floor or up from the floor. Depending on distance returned = car or no car

24

In a garage like mine, the door pivots and is horizontal when open. A distance sensor on the ceiling can therefore show whether the door is open, as well as whether there is a car there (when closed!)

25

Maybe use infrared or ultrasonic sensor with esp? Like it is always done for example at shopping center parkings
PML

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26

@nickrout, that would be neat with double usage but : -

  1. As it’s now a Tri-state sensor how would it be passed to HA? As an analogue ? (empty, occupied, door open)
  2. Would you ‘trust’ that not_open is the same as closed ?

@Argo - beautiful diagram, you obviously have far too much time on your hands :rofl:

27

You could use something like this

28

Typically, there are multiple sensors with binary states (open/closed, home/away)

29

Yeah… But he want 3 states !

30

@dap35 has interpreted the situation correctly.

31

My apologies, I didn’t understand that you didn’t need to know if there wasn’t a car.
Or are you saying “I have two states”

  1. Door closed and no car there
  2. Car detected/Door open with car possibly under it or not (depending on whether the thief closed the door on his way out)?
32

It’s 3 states with a distance sensor on the ceiling. Too lazy to convert to cm, but here’s the idea in feet:

  1. If distance is like 1 foot: garage door is open. (We can’t see if a car is parked or not because the door is in the way)

  2. If distance is around 3 feet: garage door is closed and car is parked under sensor.

  3. If distance is around 8 or 9 feet: door closed and car is not in garage.

I achieved all this with template sensors based on the distance in cm but then I moved homes and let the config blow to the wind. It’s in a thread here somewhere though.