I would like to use presence detection or location tracking to close my garage overhead when exiting the garage. I use iCloud3 for tracking and it works quite well for opening the overhead on arrival, but not so well on departure. Eventually, the overhead will close, but I have to be some distance from the house before that happens. I’m trying to use presence detection with iBeacons, but this doesn’t work well either. I’ve tried using the ble_monitor integration and Geofency, but “exit” updates happen too slowly. So my first question is this:
Does it even make sense to think I can get the overhead to close almost immediately after leaving my 30ft driveway?
If so, how?
Thanks
Immediately is a hard thing. You don’t want false positives causing it to close as you’re driving out of the garage.
Quickly, sure. I use monitor and that allows me to get departure checks down to 30 seconds or so. I’m not trying to close a door though so if it’s a little fast, or a little slow, it doesn’t matter.
What I’d suggest is that you look at using a camera doing number plate recognition or object detection. Then you can basically check for car on the drive and use that to close the door.
As long as you don’t have any security measures deployed I would stay away from automatically closing an overhead garage door…
(Crashing on your car roof accidentally is just one of the bad things possible)
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I agree with others that you’d want something very reliable and safe.
One of the cheaper options I can think of (if you need to install additional equipment and don’t e.g. have some cameras already) is to have a sensor in your garage (I use two ultrasonic sensors to know whether our cars are parked inside or not) in conjunction with something like an induction loop sensor under your driveway (some distance away) so that when you cross it, it needs to close the garage (a condition like: car A just left the garage and now triggered the loop).
I don’t do this (automatic closing), but my doors have obstruction detection. It will still hurt (a little) if it hit you or something else before it opens again.
what i do is setup auto closing after 10minutes, if no motion detected and my status is away.
I just use that as a failsafe if for some reason i forgot to close it myself.
I do already have this much in place. I wanted to get some thoughts on how practical auto-closing would be.
ive tried it with mixed results. to be honest, i dont fully trust ha 100% of the time. unfortunately. and ive been at it for 3 years now.
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