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Comment by saidajigumi | Hacker News Reader

> But there is probably no interest...

FWIW, this sounds like a hook around building a business for "next-gen" garage door openers. Security, quality of build, and convenience are among the factors that could be pitched to early adopters. Heck, this even feels like something that the right small team could work into a really sharp Kickstarter pitch, if so inclined.

One tricky problem is that garage door openers tend to "just work" for a long time. Over and above cost, upgrading is a much larger installation hassle, far larger IMO than e.g. Nest thermostats had to overcome. All of that will limit adoption rates, even for willing early adopters. A retrofit angle would help, akin to the retrofit-smart-deadbolt market.

An "interesting" sales objection would be this tech not working with cars that have built-in recording garage door remotes (vaguely similar to home theater smart remotes, for those unfamiliar).

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Also, is strong security something people expect out of a garage door remote? It's never been a feature, as far as I can remember.

Not that there isn't a market of people who do want for security in their remote, or would but don't yet know it...

Absolutely; everyone just assumes it's already secure, or at least as secure as the deadbolt on their front door.

Which is only as secure as the door frame it goes into, which usually means: pretty insecure.

Still, I agree with the premise that it's about assumptions, and if people can be made to realize that their garage door openers are inherently pretty insecure, and feel that that presents a substantial, then there's a market there. But until it becomes a problem that's common enough for media outlets to scare people about it, there probably isn't a large market yet.

(Any marketing plan for an endeavor like that should have a PR budget from day one, since that's exactly how such stories tend to become news segments.)

> Which is only as secure as the door frame it goes into, which usually means: pretty insecure.

But the door frame/deadbolt is still more secure than the remote controlled garage door because abusing the former mode of entry is more likely to draw concern from passers by and leaves a permanent record of your passage.

I think that's one valid way of looking at it, and many technically-inclined people would be inclined to agree, I'd imagine.

But another way of looking at it, and one I suspect most non-technical people would, is that it just takes one motivated person of roughly-average strength to break a doorframe. It takes someone with fairly uncommon technical sophistication to make one of these devices.

Once someone mass-produces them and sells them in real volume that perception could flip, but right now I'm far more concerned about a flimsy doorframe–which leads to where I live and sleep–than I am about someone rigging up a way to open my garage door–which only gets them into a detached garage where insured stuff is kept. The odds of a break-in being by force (whether against a door frame or a window) are just vastly higher.

Around 10 years ago, I bought a house that had two garage doors and each door had it's own separate remote and each were the insecure fixed-code kind.

I was able to easily wire-up a replacement receiver to the opener unit that allowed me to update them them to rolling code systems that were more secure and would allow me to control both on one remote. I remember it being a bit clunky, in that I had to plug the receiver into a wall outlet and run a wire back to the opener unit (I think most newer homes put in outlets in the ceiling for the opener to plug into, but this one was directly wired into a ceiling box), but it wasn't very hard to install and was a lot better than having to replace the entire unit!

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