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Chamberlain blocks smart garage door opener from working with smart homes

arstechnica.com

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Re: Chamberlain blocks smart garage door opener from working with smart homes

#101

Post by ChainOfFools »

nunez wrote: post #48

They never technically allowed it in the first place. Homebridge and Home Assistant used a popular Python library that reverse-engineered the MyQ API from the Android app. Many companies couldn't care less until abuse ramps up, but given that Chamberlain (Blackstone-owned) has gone into rent-seeking mode all of a sudden, they decided to turn the Cloudflare Super Bot Fight stuff way the hell up on their OIDC token exc…

RatGDO will handily MITM their wired signal and completely circumvent this nonsense with no cloud needed at all.

Everything exposed as entities in home assistant, everything just works, and myQ/chamberlain/genie have absolutely no idea that you are doing anything because you're not even touching their API. Just drop the cloud bs altogether.

https://github.com/PaulWieland/ratgdo

Re: Chamberlain blocks smart garage door opener from working with smart homes

#102

Post by lightbritefight »

ChainOfFools wrote: post #96
eddieroger wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not here to defend Chamberlain, mostly because I'm a pissed off user, but you are able to control your door still with RF products and buttons. Use of their API is separate, and they are able to authorize or not users to their API, which then also talks to your garage door. A lame nuance. We never own the API, we (sorta) own the product.

yep. the RatGDO project will handily MITM their wired signal and completely circumvent this nonsense with no cloud needed at all. https://github.com/PaulWieland/ratgdo

Opengarage is a similar option that comes out of the box ready to go. Also FOSS.

https://opengarage.io/

Re: Chamberlain blocks smart garage door opener from working with smart homes

#103

Post by djbusby »

CharlesW wrote: post #85
eddieroger wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not here to defend Chamberlain, mostly because I'm a pissed off user, but you are able to control your door still with RF products and buttons. Use of their API is separate, and they are able to authorize or not users to their API, which then also talks to your garage door. A lame nuance. We never own the API, we (sorta) own the product.

> … you are able to control your door still with RF products and buttons. This isn’t relevant since that’s not why I bought a Chamberlain product. I bought it specifically for the capability that they arbitrarily killed.

Could small claims them too maybe?

I'm glad they pulled this now, was just looking to upgrade our two openers for something connected to my HA.

Re: Chamberlain blocks smart garage door opener from working with smart homes

#104

Post by vineyardmike »

nordsieck wrote: post #81
WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A company is by definition... company: noun kʌm.pə.ni an organization that sells goods or services in order to make money: - OED

The definition that matters is not the OED, but the laws that govern companies.

There’s no real law to maximize profits. Just greed and a court precedent, which has way more nuance than people realize.

No body of legislation ever said that companies needed to maximize profits.

Re: Chamberlain blocks smart garage door opener from working with smart homes

#105

Post by drapermache »

wil421 wrote: post #3

The Ars comments recommend Ratgo and Messo. Ratgo for a WiFi board that connects directly to the garage doors electrical and Messo is another cheap HomeKit option from Amazon. https://paulwieland.github.io/ratgdo/

Have those comments talked about their compatibility with home assistant? I'm done with Chamberlin and their dumb app. I want a one-stop app to control all of my IoT devices, and I don't want it locked into an ecosystem.

Re: Chamberlain blocks smart garage door opener from working with smart homes

#106

Post by JohnFen »

nordsieck wrote: post #81
WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A company is by definition... company: noun kʌm.pə.ni an organization that sells goods or services in order to make money: - OED

The definition that matters is not the OED, but the laws that govern companies.

No law requires companies to have shareholders, unless they're corporations. And even then, a corporation can have a single shareholder.

Re: Chamberlain blocks smart garage door opener from working with smart homes

#107

Post by JohnFen »

djhworld wrote: post #6

The home assistant blog post goes into this issue as well https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2023/11/06/removal-of-myq... If anything it highlights the point that having a cloud service to handle your smart home device is a recipe for shenanigans like this. Stick with ZigBee/Matter devices, and if the device is WiFi try and at least make sure it works over the local network.

This. Any device like this that requires the involvement of someone else's servers is not fit for purpose.

Re: Chamberlain blocks smart garage door opener from working with smart homes

#108

Post by lightbritefight »

beart wrote: post #45

These decisions don't only sour me on Chamberlain, or smart garage door openers. They make me want to avoid home automation entirely. Yes I understand the open protocol options that are out there. Are there industry groups representing home automation solutions that push back on these decisions? But I suppose a company that controls 70% of the market is uninterested in what anyone thinks, including their own customer…

Use products on open protocols. Zigbee is the current standard. Anyhting using a zigbee radio, and to a lesser extent another protocol called zwave, can talk to any hub with a compatible radio. They are local, dedicated radio networks that do not have to talk to anyone else's servers.

There is a newer protocol called "matter" that a lot of big names have gotten behind. These devices are slowly rolling out, but id check for matter compatibility with any hub at this point.

As for the hubs, use open source that are not cloud based. The largest and most active project is called Home assistant. Its robust, has good options to build it yourself or buy devices, and it's dedicated to being forever FOSS. Another hub in the same "local, FOSS" ethos is called Hubitat. Their UI/hardware was easier than home assitant for a long time, but not really anymore. I still consider them more "turnkey" but both systems work great and support literally thousands of devices.

Re: Chamberlain blocks smart garage door opener from working with smart homes

#109

Post by Karellen »

vineyardmike wrote: post #104
nordsieck wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The definition that matters is not the OED, but the laws that govern companies.

There’s no real law to maximize profits. Just greed and a court precedent, which has way more nuance than people realize. No body of legislation ever said that companies needed to maximize profits.

> There’s no real law to maximize profits. Just greed and a court precedent,

I thought that in Common Law countries, court precedents are "real law".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law

> In law, common law (also known as judicial precedent, judge-made law, or case law) is the body of law created by judges and similar quasi-judicial tribunals by virtue of being stated in written opinions.

(emphasis mine)

Re: Chamberlain blocks smart garage door opener from working with smart homes

#110

Post by jmbwell »

anon5066294 wrote: post #65

Used to work for the IoT platform that powered Chamberlain devices. Name was Arrayent. Exit seemed unsuccessful: sold to a competitor. Wouldn't be surprised if the Arrayent stack still powering Chamberlain IoT stuff. We actually respected Chamberlain a fair bit: wrote the check that started our biz and had a technically capable engineering team. They def do have a monopoly on the garage door market: maybe this a good…

This scenario has been the case for more than one brand.

A brand doesn't necessarily have cloud/IoT expertise, so they partner with someone else. Time passes, business crap happens, the partnership fails, and the brand itself is out in the cold along with its customers, not necessarily by any fault of its own.

And now we have the likes of Tuya quietly providing turn-key white-labeled IoT services to a vast ocean of gold rush products flooding Amazon.

Why the dependency on the cloud and the lack of support for HomeKit or Matter in these devices ... I can only speculate.

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