That homebridge still works and provides local control with homekit support, however it’s still dependent on the MyQ cloud. It’s officially discontinued although their support claims they will still provide support for it. Their support team is not privy to their business decisions as we’ve seen with their recent shenanigans. It took them 2 weeks to know about the executive decision to cut off third parties. So I wouldn’t trust they know much about the future of this device and will just tell you what you want to hear. On a whim, they could discontinue support for it, or easily block it. If it’s still working, that’s great. But I’d just be prepared for them to block it at any time after this whole flying shitstorm they’ve created.
I just have the openers with no hub. When the integration went out, I figured they’d finagle a way around the problem again as they always had. So it took me a week before I ordered a pair of RatGDOs which are on 2 week backorders. So I’ve been stuck with zero automation for the past 3 weeks. In retrospect i wish I’d ordered these sooner but it hasn’t been any kind of emergency having to deal with the app and it’s takeover ads knowing I’m about to delete their shit off my phone forever as well as my account. I get a lot more automation functionality with the RatGDO than I ever did with MyQ.
Anyone that’s been following along with the RatGDO project - is there a good place to look for Paul’s communications? I’m curious about how long backorders are expected to take (not impatient - just curious). But I’d also like to keep up with updates. Is there a forum or a social media account to follow or does he typically communicate via his GitHub repository?
Ah when i said home bridge i meant the MyQ home bridge that johnsnow was talking about and not the homebridge MyQ integration. I believe he mean’t the MyQ hub so the context of my post revolves around that device.
So far it’s about 3 weeks which he states on the order page What is ratgdo? | ratgdo . he keeps that up to date pretty well. And those lead times seem to be fairly accurate. his page said 2-3 weeks when I ordered, and it took about 3 weeks for mine to arrive today. And with the ratgdo being mentioned everywhere on a bunch of sites it makes sense that the demand for it is getting stronger. I’ve seen him pop up on github every now and then talking about his device. He was fairly responsive when i left a review of the square order, and i had some product questions i asked him that way after ordering.
I am giving Open Garage, from the Open Sprinkler developer, a shot. Also got the adapter for Security2+ doors with the yellow learn button. They just shipped. I am impressed with the distance sensor to determine door open/close and car presence vs empty garage. Going to connect via MQTT and integrate into HA that way.
There is an entire section on Third Party use and interesting to see the following statement:
“While CG reserves the right to make any and all decisions regarding communications or compatibility with Third-Party Suppliers without notice, it will attempt to provide advance notice to you if there is no perceived imminent threat to the MyQ System.”
IMHO, they have to claim DDOS so that they can turn it off without attempting notice to you as the user.
However the following statement: “B. Any communication in connection with the MyQ System, whether to or from a third-party device or software system that you use shall be deemed a communication authorized by you. You agree that CG may provide such Third-Party Suppliers with information regarding your MyQ System. Without limitation, this includes information such as status of the garage door (open or closed).” Show that this is AUTHORIZED communication. You authorized it and so it is NOT UNAUTHORIZED communication.
I just had a chat with Chamberlain customer service, and asked them to give my feedback on this situation to their management.
Was surprised to get this response:
“Yes, I’m sorry, and we’ve had LOTS of complaints from customers about this. Our management is deciding what to do. And they might decide to reset the API to where it was before.”
I wonder if it was him personally locking his LinkedIn profile which was publicly accessible yesterday or if it was LinkedIn itself putting up a authwall because his profile got to many “hits” lately?
Indeeed! Not only (old) customers but all the ha community should tell such companies what … they are treating their (former) customers like …
I’m looking for a short(ish) term solution since I plan to move in about a year and don’t want to invest in a ratgdo for a short period. I won’t be buying any chamberlain related products in for the new house we’re building of course.
I have: a spare remote, 5v relays, ESP8266 and ESP32 boards, and a tilt sensor. I am sure I can figure out how to put it all together with ESPHome and automations, but if anyone has a working ESPHome example, I’d appreciate it. The example on the ESPHome site uses two buttons and seems to hold the current button down, where I want to do a short press on a single button and use the state of the tilt sensor to determine up/down (it has an accelerometer as well so I should be able to get “opening” and “closing” too.
Thanks for any pointers that could save me some time.
I recommend the tilt sensor at the top panel of the garage so that slightly open is triggered. I am thinking about using the Aqara Vibration sensor via Zigbee as it has orientation in 3 dimensions with numeric values so I can get some nuance on how far open the first panel is, as well as vibration so that I can get a time frame for last door movement to determine other status on timing and if the door is still moving.
Here is my alt setup. I used a 883LMW (security+ 2.0) opener and a Z-wave Fibaro Implant (2 dry contact relays and 2 sensor inputs). The Fibaro relays are soldered to the open/close and light push buttons on the 883LMW and the Fibaro sensor inputs are wired to 2 recessed magnetic door contacts on each side of the drive belt to detect magnets riding at the open/closed positions.
I discovered my drive belt is made of some sort of ferromagnetic material so the small ceramic bar magnets I used to trigger the open/closed sensors just magnetically stick to the belt without any adhesive but are free to move if they were to get caught on something or the door went beyond its open/closed set points. I may still add some really weak adhesive like a washable glue stick to add a bit more holding strength in case the acceleration/deceleration and vibrations of the belt start to move the magnets.
Took a bit to setup the cover template in HA but it is working perfectly and I now have the added function of a seperate light control. If you used an 882LMW you could also utilize the lockout function.
Up to, and including 2023.9.3, the MyQ integration polled the MyQ API every 15 seconds (it was reduced to 30 seconds after 2023.10). According to HA analytics, there are at least 6537 installations using MyQ. That’s an average of 435 API calls per second on their servers, only from HA users. Or almost 38 million calls every 24 hours.
I mean, honestly, how did you expect them to react when spam calling their services like that.
The security 2.0 uses a bidirectional data link to the wall button controller. Technically they could absolutely use this to update the wall push button controller firmware too. Better disconnect the whole thing from the internet to be sure.
I left some detailed info here about getting the wireless remote lockout added as an entity in home assistant. I kept seeing some yaml floating around but with zero context. So here is some more clarity on that process.
@PaulWieland didn’t want to configure those topics to automatically publish because he thinks people might mistake it for an actual door locking feature. Understandable, because it only disables the wireless the remotes. Still a handy feature for people like me wherein my wife parks in the driveway on occasion and i don’t want someone getting into the garage/house after busting her window out to get to the remote.
With that said I think disabling the wireless remotes is still a good safety feature given the user understands what it’s actually doing. It’s not the same as bolting the doors shut, but alas.
Just an FYI: I noticed the garage door button lights don’t flash when the lock is active from RATGDO like they do when you hold the lock button on the actual wall button. But normally the only way to activate the door lock is through the wall button. It’s just using some local logic on the wall button itself, so it just doesn’t have any way to know that the lock is active or not if the RATGDO enables it. I don’t think there is a real way around this, and if there is, it’s not worth the time.
Do you have any information about the userbase over the last 6.5 years since introduced in HA version 0.39?
Did it rapidly increased last month or does chamberlain maybe just have a different agenda and tries to find an cheap excuse to force more paying customer to consume advertisements with the official app for revenue?
It just slightly annoys me how the rage is all around how the evil corporation locked us out, because they hate their customers, etc etc, while conveniently ignoring the fact that HA has been hammering their API for years to the limit of what could absolutely be considered a ddos and they tolerated that until now. Why now ? Who knows. Maybe it’s indeed a business strategy thing because they want you to see their ads. Maybe they were unhappy with the 6k-something HA MyQ users sucking up so much API processing time, making the experience more laggy for their other millions of customers. Or maybe they just had an internal cost cutting round and the server costs showed up on the balance sheet. There are always two sides to a story like that.
Of course their way of reacting by completely blocking access wasn’t ideal. They could have reached out to the HA devs, proposed a partnership with proper access to their API (with push functionality instead of polling). Or even better, they could have opened the API for everybody (although that comes with a lot of legal and financial caveats). But they didn’t, and that’s their prerogative. It’s their API, they pay for its maintenance after all. The fact that the HA integration massively abused their API for years probably didn’t help. High frequency polling a cloud API is never a good idea. Ever.
Honestly that should be a minimal load. How does their app do it? How often does it poll? You have to compare the load from the app vs ha to make any valid assessmemt of whether it can be classed as spamming their servers.
That’s true. But, as far as I know, their official app doesn’t poll at all. Polling is considered really bad practice in modern webapp design, because it puts so much stress on the servers for essentially nothing. Apps will now normally use a push scenario, where the server tells the client app when something happened. That reduces the amount of stress put on the servers and the network by orders of magnitude. So if a server is designed and sized to primarily handle push requests, it can very easily be overwhelmed by high frequency polls.
