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Show HN: Raspberry Pi garage door opener

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Re: Show HN: Raspberry Pi garage door opener

#71

Post by kube-system »

GordonS wrote: post #36
theamk wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.. all data stored on SD card and lost during one of power outages / if someone bumps the cable / if it gets too hot in the summer

Not sure this actually happens. In practice. A friend works at an oil company, and they have dozens of rpis deployed on offshore rigs, and in land rigs in the middle east. They are working in pretty harsh conditions, with high salinity, sand in the air, high vibrations, very low temps, very high temps... and yet over the 6 years they have been running, not 1 has had a fault. All use SD cards, and they haven't been gl…

I've have first hand experience with a failure or two. I'd bet the SD card failure rates depend mostly on write load.

Re: Show HN: Raspberry Pi garage door opener

#72

Post by ClumsyPilot »

GordonS wrote: post #48
kavalg wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not my experience with commodity SD card, power supply and stock settings of Raspbian. They must be using some "secret sauce" to make them run 6 years without outages. I would suspect some industrial grade SD card (SLC or at least AMLC), high quality power supply (e.g. UPS with surge protection) and also some way to limit writes on the SD-card.

They are running stock Raspbian. For SD cards, they are using a mix of SanDisk, Kingston and others - consumer versions. They are indeed using UPS', and the workloads naturally have a low write load.

Is the OS perhaps booting in readonly mode? My experience with the first and second gen pi was of frequent data corruption. I have the later models, but i have hardly used them, so cant tell.

Re: Show HN: Raspberry Pi garage door opener

#73

Post by jesseryoung »

buescher wrote: post #53

I'm not going to point out the big things wrong with this project, because someone might think "oh, if I just fix those things I'm good". I will say I think it's the worst garage door opener project I've seen on hackernews yet. Nothing wrong with messing around with motors in the workshop but the author of this one should keep his project away from other human beings. Probably pets too. Here's the CPSC page on garage…

I briefly took a look at the page and checked out the comments and thought you were being a total buzzkill on a cool toy project until I went back and actually looked at the schematic.

This is project taking complete control over the motor that opens and closes the door and NOT using the simple "throw a relay on the door opener" trick that you usually see (ex: https://cdn.instructables.com/F9V/T9JH/I9YBZHM7/F9VT9JHI9YBZ...).

This project is unnecessarily dangerous for such a simple application.

Re: Show HN: Raspberry Pi garage door opener

#74

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0 »

buescher wrote: post #53

I'm not going to point out the big things wrong with this project, because someone might think "oh, if I just fix those things I'm good". I will say I think it's the worst garage door opener project I've seen on hackernews yet. Nothing wrong with messing around with motors in the workshop but the author of this one should keep his project away from other human beings. Probably pets too. Here's the CPSC page on garage…

I will say this. Having seen garage door go down without a warning, I would think twice before attempting it in such a haphazard way. Nothing wrong with a little hacking, but this project seems to be asking for trouble.

Re: Show HN: Raspberry Pi garage door opener

#75

Post by isbjorn16 »

soylentcola wrote: post #67
woutr_be wrote: post #22

Very cool project, I've been wanting to do something with my Raspberry Pi as well. I mainly wanted to focus on turning my AC units on and off. I assume I'll need some sort of IR transmitter, and possibly a receiver to understand the signals the remote is sending.

If they use IR remotes, I imagine you could plug in a network connected Pi with a USB IR blaster next to each AC unit. Then stick the IR emitter LED on the little window where the IR receiver is on the AC unit. Then it's just a matter of capturing the remote codes and setting up a way to remotely command a given Pi to send that pattern of pulses out of its IR emitter. edit: I just did a quick search and Sparkfun sell…

I can't speak to the quality of this yet, but I just bought https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B016D5L5KE/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b... kit to dork around with myself. It comes with an IR transmitter and a whole host of other stuff to play with.

That said, I do love adafruit and sparkfun for most purchases. My bank account doesn't, but I certainly do.

Re: Show HN: Raspberry Pi garage door opener

#76

Post by buescher »

jesseryoung wrote: post #73
buescher wrote: post #53

I'm not going to point out the big things wrong with this project, because someone might think "oh, if I just fix those things I'm good". I will say I think it's the worst garage door opener project I've seen on hackernews yet. Nothing wrong with messing around with motors in the workshop but the author of this one should keep his project away from other human beings. Probably pets too. Here's the CPSC page on garage…

I briefly took a look at the page and checked out the comments and thought you were being a total buzzkill on a cool toy project until I went back and actually looked at the schematic. This is project taking complete control over the motor that opens and closes the door and NOT using the simple "throw a relay on the door opener" trick that you usually see (ex: https://cdn.instructables.com/F9V/T9JH/I9YBZHM7/F9VT9JHI9…

I'll happily be a buzzkill and say don't do that either (outside of your basement garage door opener laboratory) but it's not nearly as egregious.

Re: Show HN: Raspberry Pi garage door opener

#77

Post by jiux »

buescher wrote: post #53

I'm not going to point out the big things wrong with this project, because someone might think "oh, if I just fix those things I'm good". I will say I think it's the worst garage door opener project I've seen on hackernews yet. Nothing wrong with messing around with motors in the workshop but the author of this one should keep his project away from other human beings. Probably pets too. Here's the CPSC page on garage…

>I think it's the worst garage door opener project I've seen on hackernews yet.

Would you feel encouraged or inspired if someone said this to you?

For example, instead of saying the quote above, you could have as easily said “I think this garage door opener project has a lot of opportunity for improvement”.

Mindset goes a long way, and it might just help make a friend or two along the way.

Re: Show HN: Raspberry Pi garage door opener

#78

Post by buescher »

jiux wrote: post #77
buescher wrote: post #53

I'm not going to point out the big things wrong with this project, because someone might think "oh, if I just fix those things I'm good". I will say I think it's the worst garage door opener project I've seen on hackernews yet. Nothing wrong with messing around with motors in the workshop but the author of this one should keep his project away from other human beings. Probably pets too. Here's the CPSC page on garage…

>I think it's the worst garage door opener project I've seen on hackernews yet. Would you feel encouraged or inspired if someone said this to you? For example, instead of saying the quote above, you could have as easily said “I think this garage door opener project has a lot of opportunity for improvement”. Mindset goes a long way, and it might just help make a friend or two along the way.

You are correct. I intended to discourage the poster. Any "opportunity for improvement" could be misinterpreted as "just fix this one thing".

Re: Show HN: Raspberry Pi garage door opener

#79

Post by markvdb »

buescher wrote: post #53

I'm not going to point out the big things wrong with this project, because someone might think "oh, if I just fix those things I'm good". I will say I think it's the worst garage door opener project I've seen on hackernews yet. Nothing wrong with messing around with motors in the workshop but the author of this one should keep his project away from other human beings. Probably pets too. Here's the CPSC page on garage…

I just added your remark as an issue to the submitter's repo:

https://github.com/evzaboun/garage-door/issues/1

Re: Show HN: Raspberry Pi garage door opener

#80

Post by laurensr »

buescher wrote: post #53

I'm not going to point out the big things wrong with this project, because someone might think "oh, if I just fix those things I'm good". I will say I think it's the worst garage door opener project I've seen on hackernews yet. Nothing wrong with messing around with motors in the workshop but the author of this one should keep his project away from other human beings. Probably pets too. Here's the CPSC page on garage…

I did a similar project at my home & I dare say it is safer, though technically much uglier. It consists of a Raspberry Pi with a PiFace Digital board (with relays). The relays don't drive the motor directly: it "pushes" (shorts/connects) the manual open/close button on the garage door's system board.
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