Shelly 1 garage door automation, and opening / closing with Google Assistant

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1

Hi,

Perhaps a newbie question, but I’m not sure how to fix this minor bug in my set up.

Like many others with garage door openers, I’ve used Shelly 1’s to automate the garage doors, and they work great, and I have the entities synced with our Google Assistant so they can be opened by voice commands when required, where we have a PIN code, which google asks for when opening the door.

BUT, my wife has just found a minor bug, which potentially gives a security issue. She’s found out that even though the garage door is closed, it’s still possible to say ‘Hey Google, CLOSE the garage door’, and the garage door then OPENS, without of course asking for the PIN.

Now the question is, can I do something on the Home Assistant end, so that Google can see that the door is actually closed, and therefore doesn’t need to close it (where it actually opens the door), or is it a Google issue? Has anyone else experienced this?

2

You should have a mechanical switch on garage door to see if they are closed. No software solution will be bulletproof. Something like reed relay or similar.
If you have shelly 1 then one of options is to program it with esphome, then you can program shelly’s button input (SW) as “garage closed” control. That way you’ll know in HA if door is close or not. With shelly 2 (which has 2 SW inputs) you could extend this with “open” switch, too.

3

Thanks for the reply. I have the door set up with a mechanical switch, and am using the input switch off the Shelly, so I can see in home assistant that the door is open, or closed.

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I can also ask Google the status of the door, and it will give me the correct answer (so Google knows that the door is closed, when it is).

So why is it that Google doesn’t seem to recognise that the door is already closed when saying close commands, especially when it knows the status?

I was just wondering if there’s something else I can do…

4

This was just pointed out to me as well! I think for now, I am going to have to remove the garage door from Google Assistant, until this is sorted out. This was the first post I found in my search, so I’m hoping that someone has figured it out somewhere. Let me know if you ever found a solution.

5

Google is great for following commands, without deep thought as to checking things out before actually doing them. So it needs some more AI development on that issue.

I have the Shelly UNI coming for my garage doors. Basically to monitor that they are closed without having to go all that way to the garage, which can be problematic for some people.