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Comment by NickM | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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...

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.

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.

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

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.

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