Background#
The Gliderol door on my home garage has often been a source of frustration; the remotes don’t work every time, the batteries drain quickly and they are expensive to replace. Add those issues to the fact that the 27MHz system has almost no security whatsoever and I have many good reasons to replace the remote. I finally did something about it.
Early Plans#
As with many of the problems I encounter, I designed many systems to solve it; an NRF24 based system (2.4GHz), an off the shelf 433MHz system, or another solution based on Microchip Keeloq. Unfortunately, those systems either didn’t significantly improve the situation or required the fabrication of a custom remote. I let it rest for a couple of years, and continued struggling with frequent battery changes.
The Solution#
Finally, I settled on a viable solution; an ESP8266. Armed with a breadboard, a nodeMCU development board, some jumper wires, a transistor, and a few resistors, I set to the task of creating a MQTT capable roller door controller. When disassembled, the original controller revealed a pin header connector. With a little circuit tracing and probing, I found all the connections necessary on a convenient 2x8 pin header, power, ground(0V) and trigger. I wired up the transistor to switch 0V to the trigger pin, grabbed some example MQTT code from GitHub and some short coding time later, I had a working system.
Practical Home Automation#
I use a Raspberry Pi in my network to act as a local DNS server (for my in home mirrors of my own domain) and DHCP server (which allows my custom routes). It was the obvious place to install some home automation software. After some searching, I discovered OpenHAB, which ticked all the boxes; open source, runs on Pi, Android app.
At first it seemed like the problem was solved, however the system started to show ‘gremlins’ after running for a couple of days, with the door occasionally activating by itself; I’d wake up to an open garage! I replaced the transistor with an optocoupler and the problem of random triggers disappeared.
Making it Nice#
Following a period of a few weeks of the system working correctly, I was determined to convert it into a more permanent solution. In my prototyping drawer, I had a Wemos D1 and prototyping shield. A piece of strip board and a female header later and I now have a pluggable solution that allows me to reliably activate my roller door, from anywhere on Earth, using a button on my phone.