Installed an open source garage door opener, and I'm loving it | Hacker News Reader

Installed an open source garage door opener, and I'm loving it

arstechnica.com

141 pointsChumpGPT66 comments

I just got new garage doors installed with new openers, and I saw that the openers support myQ, and that my car does too, and I thought "sweet, I'll be able to open and close the garage from my car without any extra hardware".

Turns out myQ charges a subscription fee for the privilege of using this feature.

I could install an opener like this one, but it still wouldn't solve the in-car integration side of things. Anyone know of any clever workarounds for this? Seems like maybe I could MITM the myQ service since my car and garage would both be on the same WiFi when I'm home, but I don't know if there are OSS replacements for the myQ server software.

From what I've read, myQ is pretty locked down and doesn't support local control (outside of a HomeKit device that I think is no longer supported).

I would guess that the cert pinning would prevent such MITM attack, but I could be wrong. I'm not a huge fan of Chamberlain and myQ since they are so against 3rd party use of their products [0].

[0] https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2023/11/06/removal-of-myq...

You can just buy a RATGDO device and use it with your opener!

https://paulwieland.github.io/ratgdo/

It's a reverse-engineered device that you can attach to the opener. It works perfectly, and provides local control and monitoring.

You can also use it alongside the official myQ client, if you want to use in-garage delivery from Amazon.

I don't know how anyone could stand to work at Chamberlain. Getting rid of the previous HomeKit integration they supported, basically for no good reason other than greed, is corporate brained idiocy.

Sounds like something Apple would do. Oh, wait

Their market cap says they are pretty terrible you are right

That has to be some kind of fallacy. Just because something grew large, doesn't mean that it always does good things.

Along the lines of your comment: Apple sent private security that impersonated the police into a personal man's home, but Apple is so large, that means that was okay, right?

I missed that story. Link?

Internet search keywords: Apple security impersonated police house

https://appleinsider.com/articles/11/09/02/sfpd_has_no_recor...

+1, ratgdo is amazing.

A bit of fiddling to get it properly flashed and configured, and ever since it's worked flawlessly with HA.

MyQ is nice, especially with the account management and easy door status viewing from your smartphone anywhere at any time. But I'm not up for the enshittified exorbitant rent-seeking subscription fee and needlessly closed API interface.

I bought a https://www.meross.com/en-gc/smart-garage-door-opener/garage...

Apparently you can hijack the mqtt setup and manage it locally (I mostly wanted to know if I forgot to close the door, so I'm pretty okay with the Meross app).

I guess it doesn't have the built in support for the obfuscated protocol, my opener is just a dry contact so I didn't need to look into it.

I also got a Meross garage door opener, primarily so the kids could get in and out of the house without having to shuffle our two physical clickers around every day (depending on who would be home first).

My wife commented that it's the only useful technology I've ever implemented.

Like you, and haven't yet done the "make it work locally" hijack thing yet - but I haven't needed to because it works well.

Knowing that the door has been left up has also come in handy a couple of times. Also been able to open the garage door to let people into the house to feed the pets while we're away.

Only issue I had is that the WiFi range on the single unit is woeful. I had to put a WiFi repeater within the garage for it to see the signal.

Yeah, the wifi connection on my setup is flaky. Not an attached garage though, a good distance from my router, with cinder block walls.

I set one of these up the other day with HA: works perfectly/as-advertised.

If you use Apple CarPlay, any garage door opener you have will appear on your dashboard when you are close to it. No subscription, no need for device to have internet access. Not exactly the same as it's not using hardware in your car and you'll need your phone, but this works nicely for me.

Probably this is why MyQ/Chamberlin doesn’t support HomeKit.

I have CarPlay and my RAV4 Prime's built-in garage door opener button works, but I've never seen anything on my CarPlay about the garage. How does this work?

Does your car not have HomeLink? Homelink works fine with MyQ, no subscription required.

My cars (2018 Odyssey) home link transmitter is terribly underpowered. I have to right up to the door for it to work. The $15 remotes from Amazon work fine from the street.

I have a RATGDO, and have an automation that opens my garage door when I drive up.

Ratdgo + Homebridge and you can control your doors with Siri. And probably Android Auto with a different bridge, but I don't have that.

Can you use homelink? or have they removed this?

I inherited a garage door opener that does homelink/myq and the homelink is radio-based that your car can learn, while myq is wifi nonsense that I turned off.

Most cars I’ve seen still have the regular old three buttons on the visor and those work just fine even with a myQ enabled opener.

The myQ car integration just enables things like auto-open and close based on the car’s location.

For those saying just use ratgdo - unless something has changed recently, it’s not as feature complete as myQ. For instance, myQ lets you add time-bound guest access.

Also, after the price increases, ratgdo is half the price of the entire opener.

Home Link is the common term in the US if that helps with additional searching

Most cars in the US have these buttons? What is the function of each?

Home Assistant has Android Auto support. You can also buy a zigbee wireless switch and put it in your car, and configure homeassistant to open the door when that wireless switch is pressed.

It's great to see more and more open source hardware products that work seamlessly with home assistant.

Home assistant is getting more and more user friendly and these open IoT devices also improve significantly.

I am quite positive that there will be an "alternative" ecosystem to proprietary subscription locking in ones.

I helped my friend instal one of these closed source ones and I never saw the point. They shut down their integration with his Alexa and other automations later which was amusing, but it kind of just showed off the fact that, yeah, you pretty much push the button in your car or the button inside your garage or on the keypad outside your garage and that’s pretty much all you ever do with a garage door so this smart home stuff doesn’t really add much.

One thing I like about them is the peace of mind it brings. On the very rare occasion that I somehow forget to close my garage when I leave (maybe I’m in a rush and the button in my car didn’t register), it’s nice to be able to close the door remotely.

You can also open the garage door remotely for someone, e.g. your kid who wants to take out their bike, or a person who was supposed to pick something up from you but you couldn't be at home.

I don't even have a garage, but I run the media tech at German university. I wouldn't care for Alexa, but having actual remote control (and monitoring) over things can be incredibly useful. Not that useful that you have to have it at any cost, but still useful.

I have an automation that locks my front door, closes the garage door if it’s open, and arms my home alarm. I can let someone in my house if I’m away, and I can see at a glance if someone left the garage door open when it should be closed. That’s pretty damn useful in my book.

Locks front door - great, someone left it open and yes it's locked, but it's not closed (more expensive locks have a sensor to ensure the deadbolt made it into the frame)

Garage door - similar, you don't know if someone disconnected the automatic and it's just reporting itself in the down position because the chain/drive has moved but the door hasn't.

Both solvable just some failure modes no one talks about.

My security system and the door lock have sensors to detect if the front door and the garage are closed or open.

What system / hardware is that?

Not gp but when we built our house we put magnetic switches in the jamb that close when it senses the metal bolt.

Ring alarm system, and Yale door lock.

I use ring-mqtt, so I can see the individual door sensors in Home Assistant, and have automations setup that include them.

Edit: I also have some older Ring door sensors directly connected to Home Assistant via ZHA, and use those to monitor my garage door’s position. Because I’m using RATGDO in dry contact mode, I don’t get door position from it. So I created a “synthetic” cover entity in Home Assistant that incorporates the additional sensors and the status from RATGDO to show the “real” status of my door. It includes time outs, so if someone stops the door half way, the entity will switch from “closing/opening” to “open” if the door isn’t closed after the time out.

I don't see the point in 95% of home automation projects, but I've decided to accept that other people see it differently and if they have fun with these kinds of projects, it doesn't hurt me in any way at all.

Another local-only alternative; Athom have a pre-flashed ESPHome Garage Door opener which has a reed switch for determining whether the door is closed. Works flawlessly for me, and less than half the price.

https://www.athom.tech/blank-1/garage-door-opener-for-esphom...

I have this one and use it with my Chamberlain opener. You just wire it to button trigger and stick the rees switch on the door. It works great.

I have a variety of Shelly 1 devices in my house, one of which is on the oldschool Garage Door opener (with a reed switch for open/close tracking) - Very inexpensive, flexible for other applications, and works with HA etc.

https://us.shelly.com/products/shelly-1-gen3

Huge fan of shelly. I wrote a little sinatra web-server that can just show the current state, and toggle the state, of a bunch of lights around my yard. I really appreciate that all you need is http, no cloud, no fuss to just put together a custom ui for them. Couldn't recommend them more highly

The Shelly Uni is the correct device to use for these applications:

https://shelly.digital/product/shelly-uni/

It can be powered by 12-24V DC or AC, so you can power it off the accessory wiring of the device. It has two relays to control two different actions (my gate has a secondary partial open mode, to walk through it without opening all the way), and has two digital inputs to monitor state of the device (my gate exposes an "is open" and "is closed" state).

The setup in the app is a bit confusing though. Well the app seems like it was designed by a Unix neckbeard, but it is very powerful - I haven't needed to switch to MQTT/Home Assistant to do the automations I want.

My devices can be triggered by a momentary switch: press and release to open, press and release again to close. The app has a "Momentary" switch type, but that did not work for me. I had to use "Toggle Switch" then set a auto off timer for 0.1 seconds.

I'm pretty much all in on ESPHome in my house. Have all the lights, air conditioners and anything else that might be left on wired up.

Walking out my front door I hit "lights off" and "AC off" on my phone and everything turns off.

If my phone drops off home wifi for over an hour inger notifications if I've left the garage door open (and can close it remotely).

Open source IoT is great.

My roomate started an arduino project for this and we used the sonic sensor perpendicular to the ground to be able to tell how much the door was opened too (by measuring how close the top side of the door was to the sensor as it moved closer to the door opener).

To "talk" to the door we ended up buying some sort of universal remote controller that we tore apart to change the button you press for a relay that the arduino was able to use. A raspberry in front of the arduino ran a webpage and more smarts.

We tried to make mac address detection on the wifi network to realize our phones connected home after work, but ended up not using that as it felt risky.

What did you need the Arduino for that you couldn't do with the GPIOs on the Raspberry Pi?

I guess, but things started with an Arduino and no project.

OK, nerd sniped.

I bought an OpenGarage and then saw that it had MQTT integration. So... installed MQTT and got that working.

Then asked how hard would it be to hook this up to Alexa and get voice control working? Not toooooo hard ... working.

Then... how hard to get all of my home automation IOT/OAUTHish stuff integrated into MQTT+Alexa? ... a fair bit of work, but .... done!

So, now MQTT is the heart of a system that can talk to my tempest weather station, Tesla, sprinklers, opengarage, ecobee, sense, flume, smartthings controller, all queryable and controllable via voice.

Amazing what is possible these days.

My opener broke a few months ago, maybe 10+ year old model that I previously had on zwave via GoControl.

I just got a cheap homedepot Chamberlain to replace it and got ratgdo. Works much better than my old zwave solution.

I use Z-Wave for everything. I looked into Home Assistant, but went with a Hubitat C8 Pro hub bridged to HomeKit on my Apple TV. A Z-wave multi-relay and tilt sensor kit is under $100, and just works.

Home Assistant is more flexible, and has nicer dashboards, but it's also way more of a PITA to get everything working consistently. Hubitat, OTOH, has just worked, with very little tinkering. I had some issues early on with it running slow, but later firmwares resolved all such issues.

If you're a fraidy-cat, look into "SwitchBot" which you can mount externally to physically push the button on the wall.

Otherwise, I've been really happy with the iSmartGate I put in years ago. The wiring isn't difficult, and the HomeKit integration is essential for me.

Similar "that's useful!" experience as everyone else in the thread, but an annoyance sometimes is that "closing" is free, but opening requires "FaceID", which makes a ton of sense but means I never use it outside of automations since it requires fishing out the phone and a free hand (and that's just easier to mash the button on the wall).

I have automations to automatically close the door at 10:20am, 5:30pm, and "sunset" which catches like 90% of the "accidentally left open" use cases. Asking Siri if the garage door is closed even when you're out of the house is super useful as well.

I'm still rocking my myQ Home Bridge that I got after myQ walled of their API.

I paired the 819LMB with my iOS home, and then 'released' it, which made Home-Assistant able to see it. Paired it in there and now I have restored the old-style functionality that you can't even get anymore today. myQ doesn't even offer a subscription to control your own device.

Better yet, it works fully offline (ok, you need WiFi), and you don't need to go through the MyQ app which is less of a garage-remote-control but more of a way to show you advertisements for WalMart+.

Only thing it doesn't do correctly is naming remotes, so I don't know whether it was my car, or one of the portable remotes that opened up the garage door. But I never checked that anyway.

I live in an apartment building and was given a fob that opens my apartment garage door and doors in the building. The fob takes specific lithium coin batteries and lately has been acting worse, I practically have to replace the batteries every day to use it. I had my Flipper Zero read the signals (the fob does one for garage door, one for the other doors) and I now use that to get into my building. Instead of having to buy two new lithium coin batteries every day, I just have to charge my Flipper Zero every few weeks. I heard the Flipper Zero had other uses, and I did scan some other things with it, but I got it in the hopes that it could handle my garage door, and it does.

OpenGarage is great. I have an overcomplicated system that goes from iPhone widget -> Apple Home -> Home Assistant (HomeKit Bridge) -> OpenGarage, but it has worked great for the past few years. I could probably cut out the Apple-dependent steps with some more effort.

Takes me 2 seconds to pick up my phone, swipe to the widget screen, and hit the garage button. Within 1 second, the garage door opens/closes.

Edit: removed HomeBridge, it's actually HomeKit Bridge which is a HA integration

Why are you using Homebridge to talk to Home Assistant? It has a built-in integration to expose devices to HomeKit.

Could also look at something like a RF and IR control hub.

Something like https://www.orvibo.com/mobile/en/product/allone.html

I’ve used it to control window blinds, projectors, projector screens, and even some basic Apple TV commands. Wouldn’t surprise me if it could do the RF used by garage doors too.

GitHub: https://github.com/opengarage

Website: https://opengarage.io/

Looks to be related, opensprinkler: https://github.com/opensprinkler

I always wonder how IOT devices and insurance interact. If a company made device is hacked and lets someone in, does insurance cover it? What about if you’ve “rolled your own”?

I have this and OpenSprinkler in my house, and love them both.

Hated myQ even before it went subscription.

> Hated myQ even before it went subscription.

My openers have myQ and it worked so terribly I gave up on using it. The opening/closing worked intermittently, and the monitoring of open status only worked once, and never again. It was so bad that I spend 5 hours to get my in-car controls working with the opener instead.

I can't imagine paying a subscription for that.

Smart homes continue to be a spectacular disaster of industrial and economic self destruction.

At this point the only way home iot works is if chatgippity can perfectly cross translate and amalgamate undocumented apis.

... Yeah

OpenGarage's device can keep a cloud connection open to Blynk or the maker's own OpenThings.io cloud server.

Let's hook up the garage door to a system that, if it were hacked, would let anyone on the Internet control it. What could go wrong? /s

I just don't get it.

Garage doors are not high security devices. Hackers on the internet are the least of your concerns. If someone is going to break in, it's the idiot down the street with a crowbar, not a nerd 3 states away.

Imagine someone opening the garage doors of every house that has this installed. The fact that physical access is needed to open the door, legally or not, is a good thing.

The nerd 3 states away is not going to break in. The script kiddie 3 states away running a bot and opening garage doors en masse for the lulz is going to be a problem. Especially if the random idiot from down the street gets your ebikes without using a crowbar, because he passes by in the right moment.

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