we have underground parking in the house where we live and to open the garage you have to pull a cord in the middle or call the garagedoor.
Since there is no cell service down there you can’t work with iOS Shortcuts in combination with Carplay.
So I wanted to use Sipgate in combination with a button at the door to send a phonecall after a delay - only to find out Sipgate doesn’t promote their API any longer to private accounts.
There are two old spare mobile phones lying around I could get a second SIM card for but I don’t like the thought of an old mobile phone permanent plugged in.
Has someone experience or a creative idea how to solve this?
Manually calling the garagedoor before I leave is something I find annying ^^
I know it’s a bit of a fuzz for such a thing…don’t we all do most of these automations not only to make life a little bit easier but also because tinkering is fun?
Back in the day I used to use a Modem for such things - with AT commands you could dial numbers pause and then enter additional numbers (to navigate PBX etc).
The timing of the dial is pretty consistent so you can just time it, then send an ATH command.
The problem with that approach is you will need a hard line (old school phone line) and I haven’t had one of those in nearly 20 years.
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One other thought you, might be able to get a VOIP adapter:
Ethernet on one side.
Phone jack on the other (used with wired home phones).
Plugging a modem into that “might” work - its not going to be a common use case though so I would give it “at best” a 50/50 chance.
Better keyword to search: ATA (I’m still using this for VoIP)
You have to make sure though that it’s possible to send a call command from HA.
I have been thinking in the past to look for a possibility to achieve this but didn’t find a way (yet)
I don’t have a need for this (either VOIP or automatically calling a phone number).
But before my previous post, I did a bit of Googling I found www.ooma.com the website says that it supports old school faxes, so theres a chance hooking up a modem to it would work.
To be clear I have never used it / have no association with it, but that was my thinking when I said “VOIP Adapter”.
If Sipgate (a german phone service provider for companies) would still be usable by private entities I would just trigger their phone call API over a Zigbee button with a time delay.
My phone can’t make a call since there is no service down there.
@dtrott
I’m thinking about an Arduino with GSM module and get a second SIM card for 2-3€ per month. I have never done something with an Arduino and stuff like this so it could be a fun project.
I guess it should be possible to send instructions from Home Assistant to the Arduino.
@Nick4
No, it is not our garagedoor. So I can’t tinker with it
Good question, if my phone has still HA connection down there. Next to the garagedoor (door for humans to enter the garage) is the door to the wash room and there is an power plug, door sensor and water leak sensor (our flat is above the wash room) and they have connection to my Zigbee network.
What is the relation with the garagedoor and your idea to be able to control it?
You have to somehow be able to make a call to the control of the garagedoor.
Either you do this from your phone, with a cellular connection to the phone system or with a SIP account over WiFi.
The other option would be to do this with HA connected to a SIP device which you could initiate from your phone IF you have connection to your HA.
There are multiple ways to get HA to send a “message” to an external system listed in order of increasing complexity:
Shell Command - Limited execution time to 1 minute.
RESTful Command
Simple MQTT Topic - just send a message on a topic.
Full MQTT integration - auto-discovery etc.
Build your own (python) integration.
I typically do the 4th one (MQTT integration) but that’s because I have already spent days messing with it / have code written to make it easier, the Shell Command will probably work for you.
Don’t know yet. But in the end these components are all computers so there is a way to for inter-communication.
Yeah, that was where Sipgate would come in if they still would let private persons use their API.
@dtrott
Thank you for the list - the MQTT solution sounds like fun
And would fit great into the theme why I set up MQTT (LXC), Zigbee2MQTT (LXC) and HAOS (VM) separately to explore the underlying protocol more.
After a quick lookup I found the hardware needed and some starting guides.
This will be my next project and I hope I find time for it in the next months
