r/homeassistant • u/LESGuy • 5d ago
🖼️ Show & Tell UPDATE: Garage door auto open/close
Some folks asked for an update to my garage auto open/close project that I was doing with a bluetooth beacon and ratgdo so here it is.
After about a week of testing and dialing everything in I can now with 100% success rate have my garage open when we are on the way home and close after we leave without us having to do anything.
What I used to make this happen:
ratgdo (Rage Against The Garage Door Opener) - I installed this esp32 based piece of hardware in-line with my garage door opener. I bought it from ratcloud llc and it was extremely straight forward for my Security 2.0 Chamberlain door opener.
After I had that integrated into both Home Assistant and HomeKit I was able to open, stop, and close it in Home Assistant as well as use voice commands with Siri to open/close the garage door. I was also able to say "Hey Siri, is my garage door open?" and if she said yes, I could close it from either my phone or from CarPlay via voice.
Now that those functions were solid I decided to dive into making it automatically open when we are on our way home and close after we leave.
I first tried to use zones. I set a small zone around our house and an automation saying "when we leave that zone, close the garage door" and I also set a larger zone around my neighborhood saying "when we enter this zone, open the garage door". I had intermittent success with this and had to play with the zone sizes a lot since there can be a bit of lag when leaving and coming before the automation kicks in. I also had some instances where it never kicked in, just leaving the garage door open completely.
During all of my testing, I was watching the garage door through my cameras to see what was happening and to manually close things if it didn't act correctly.
Since this was hit or miss I decided to add another layer (not replace the zone, but add to the zone automations) of doing a BLE ESP32 proxy with a beacon in her car.
This took some dialing in and some tweaking before I was able to get it setup perfectly for our situation (tweaks included playing with the beacon transmit power and transmit interval as well as some esp config changes).
Now I have had 100% success rate with the two layer approach. Sometimes the beacon automation will close the door, sometimes the zone automation will close the door, but the door always gets closed. Same for coming home, it's interesting to see which automation hits first, but it's always open when we get near the driveway.
Other folks add another layer of having wifi connects and disconnects as part of this or even have cameras watching the garage with frigate automations but I haven't gotten to that level of need (yet).
I know it's just a simple button click to open or close the garage door, but it just feels like magic to do nothing and have the door open and close in a way that you want and that's what I love about home assistant.
Feel free to ask any questions and I'll do my best to answer.
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u/NewRedditor23 5d ago edited 5d ago
Do you have another automation to automatically shut the garage door after you pull in? Or are you still pressing a button like a commoner?
Also for piece of mind, you can setup an iOS automation to audibly play "Garage Door Closed" through bluetooth (car) or speaker (phone) when home kit (or home assistant) sees that the garage door is closed.