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Comment by gmurphy | Hacker News Reader

I love Lora - our apartment's garage remotes have a range of about 5 meters, and the gate opens super slowly. This is annoying for us and everyone around us as we live on a business street, so have to either be parked across a footpath, or block traffic in the street while we wait for it all to happen.

So I rigged up a bunch of stuff using some RFM95 Lora modules, relays, and a smattering of crypto, and now I can start my garage door opening from several blocks away. Now by the time my car gets there, it's ready for us to drive in.

It started as breadboard/feather mess, but has progressed over time as I've taught myself PCB design to make ever-smaller remotes. It also means I can make multiple remotes, and put them on each of my bags, bikes, cars etc.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B11m1y5J3qc/

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This is great, I've been working on stuff like this as well, using LoRa.

I'm in the same boat and looking to learn pcb design to make my own hardware. Any recommendations you can give?

I went through a few KiCad tutorials (it's improved a lot over the past few years), and a lot of trial and error. With PCBWay and JLCPCB making it super cheap and delivered in a few days, it means you don't have to worry about mistakes so much.

My process is largely:

- mock it up with arduino boards

- mock it up on a breadboard with straight chips wired up like an Arduino but without all the stuff I don't need

- make a KiCad design that matches that

- make the PCBs, realize I made a few holes the wrong size, make more PCBs

- build, test, use

- plan to do it without the Arduino parts, but then give up after trying and failing to make Atmel Studio do anything

> failing to make Atmel Studio do anything

gosh no. avr-gcc, avr-libc, avrdude are all you need. Email is in my profile if you have specific questions.

Ahh, all those things I see when Arduino is doing its thing - I have some reading to do - thank you for putting me on this path!

Thank you! This is giving me excitement for the future. How are you dealing with customized cases and enclosures for the boards?

I 3D print them - quick prototypes I use my own printer, for more durable/nicer plastic stuff I go through Shapeways (~$20), and for the metal stuff I get them CNCed through 3D Hubs ($150). Here's an example of a volume controller I made:

https://twitter.com/gmurphy/status/1179828311049945088

Back home shared garage doors or barriers just have GSM module and a whitelist of phone numbers so you can just use Siri to dial it.

Although if you're targeted at all (I don't know what country this is and how much public info is available—phone numbers are very easily found in the US), it'd be trivial to spoof your caller ID and open it

Dunno how trivial it is but brute force or social engineering would certainly be more trivial.

So basically you decided to put the telephone company in charge of your garage security.

I'm sure that's a real high priority for them.

Stuff like this is why we have SIM swap attacks.

Its a shared garage. It would take 20 seconds of social engineering for your “neighbour” to lock it.

I think some can have passcode tho.

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