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Show HN: Raspberry Pi garage door opener

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Re: Show HN: Raspberry Pi garage door opener

#61

Post by beervirus »

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…

Yeah I thought this was going to be a page about controlling an existing garage door opener via a Raspberry Pi.

This is nuts.

Re: Show HN: Raspberry Pi garage door opener

#62

Post by rootusrootus »

I want to say cool project, because I love home automation and have done a fair bit in my own home (though mostly just lights...). But having recently experienced a failure with my own garage door opener that destroyed the door and could have seriously injured a person, I think I'd be reluctant to completely homebrew my own solution.

Re: Show HN: Raspberry Pi garage door opener

#63

Post by soylentcola »

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.

That's nuts. I had to replace some old Cisco media players that we used as digital schedule boards outside of ~20 classrooms. The Cisco players were quite old and only needed to load a webpage that pulled schedule info from elsewhere and displayed it in the proper format.

I decided to do this with RPi and went through several revisions as I learned/relearned a lot about Linux. The first version was built on full Raspbian and added a basic server listening on some port or another so I could remotely reboot the things by clicking links on a simple website I put together. That build would usually crap out after a few months and the Pis would stop booting fully from the Sandisk MicroSD cards.

Most recent rev was built from the "Lite" version of Raspbian as I was looking to stay slim and have less stuff to update/run in the background/cause issues with the basic operation of a device that only needed to boot, load Chromium, and open a webpage defined in the startup script.

Those have been a lot more stable (no more reimaging a card here and there every month or two) but they still occasionally crap out and a reimage is the only option (maybe once every 6-8 months). This is in an air conditioned building with stable power, wired LAN connection, and fast SD cards. I can't imagine they would be even this reliable running all the time in any sort of "hostile" environment or even using wireless networking.

I looked into network boot but didn't really have the time or resources to set it all up on the school's network.

Re: Show HN: Raspberry Pi garage door opener

#64

Post by exabrial »

This is lacking some very critical safety systems such as breakbeam detection (someone walks into the path of a closing door), endstops (the system unexpectedly travels to the end of the track), torque/motor stall monitoring (aka crushing someone to death), and door speed monitor (the door starts moving faster than the motors are moving it)

Re: Show HN: Raspberry Pi garage door opener

#65

Post by gambiting »

kahlonel wrote: post #60
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…

Calm down, please. It's "experimental". No sane person is actually going to use this.

>>No sane person is actually going to use this.

What makes you so sure?? I see people using such "experimental" devices all the time. Unless you tell someone explicitly why it's a bad idea they won't know.

Re: Show HN: Raspberry Pi garage door opener

#67

Post by soylentcola »

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 WiFi IR blaster boards for $20. I'd imagine you could find cheaper ones on Aliexpress or other places where you typically find cheap electronics. This would probably be simpler to set up versus a Pi with less things to break since it's not booting a "full" general purpose OS.

https://www.sparkfun.com/products/15031

Re: Show HN: Raspberry Pi garage door opener

#68

Post by unnouinceput »

dirktheman wrote: post #37
aequitas wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I second this. Pi is well suited for HA if you don't do have database stuff. And the Shelly allows to still keep manual controls in case your automation is broken. Although I've grown cautious of products like Shelly which use Wifi as they will become obsolete once their Wifi security protocol becomes broken (like WEP en WPA). But then again the same probably goes for more expensive Zigbee and Zwave devices.

My WiFi-connected IOT devices run on a separate network, with outgoing connections disabled, but that's more out of a privacy concern. I'm a big fan of IOT and home automation, with one exception: door locks. I wouldn't trust any electronic device with my door lock. There's just so much more that can go wrong, both from a technical and a security standpoint. Also, electronic door locks aren't THAT more convenient tha…

I have a story for you. You see my daughter had hard time turning the key in the old lock. Somebody else had to open the door for her all the time when she was coming home from nearby playground. Even she had her own key she was lacking physical power to turn the key.

So my solution was to buy an electromagnetic lock, which also could be opened by key in case of power outage. And I did exactly this - an RPi was in charge of opening the door via my private WiFi network so when my daughter was coming home, she was connecting her smartphone to my WiFi, launch an app I also wrote and used that to open the door.

Now the funny thing is that the electromagnetic lock was so sensitive that it required a lot less power to open it via its mechanical key so she ended using that most of the time, only in rare occasions of a new friend she was showing off that she is able to open the door via phone.

Re: Show HN: Raspberry Pi garage door opener

#69

Post by kn0where »

kavalg wrote: post #47
GordonS wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

I have an original RPi in my parents garage in Arizona that checks if the garage door is open and sends a notification if it’s left open too long. It’s been there a few years now, survived the hot summers just fine. Using an ordinary SanDisk SD card and a decent quality phone charger for power. Occasionally it locks up and my parents unplug it and plug it back in and it boots fine.

Re: Show HN: Raspberry Pi garage door opener

#70

Post by blackfawn »

I'd recommend driving a FET or two to connect at the push button(s) (i.e. GPIO is "pushing the button") rather than the relay board to drive the motor. Not only is jumping the switch(es) more simple, you also stay on the low voltage side of things and any safeties built in would still be present.

ETA: by push buttons, I mean the "normal" garage door buttons that would open and close the door (typically on a wall in the garage.) these typically use some low power, e.g. 12-20V. And the safeties the manufacturer would have built in would still work as it'd be as if you were pressing the manufacturer's open/close button, but remotely.

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