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Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API

home-assistant.io

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Re: Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API

#341

Post by chewmieser »

bonestamp2 wrote: post #267
novakinblood wrote: post #102

I felt silly at first complaining to my wife I couldn’t get myQ working again, thinking I did something wrong after adding an automation. We tried to open the door (remote via hass) for my son when he got home but it didn’t work. Obviously it was something I did?(nope) Then I watched the discussion on discord and realized I’m not alone albeit still a small percentage. Then I see this as top post on hn. It’s frustrati…

It does suck, but can you still use it remotely via the myQ app?

MyQ app should work fine. Just not the API integration to MyQ.

Re: Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API

#342

Post by fennecfoxy »

Why even buy a product like this anyway? Aren't there plenty of "dumb" smart garage door openers?

Aren't there plenty of great stand alone garage door openers that you can wire a smart relay or whatever into?

From what I can see there are plenty of "wifi garage door adaptor" options and everything looks to have pretty standard wiring, it's only not "plug and play" cause it's bare wires rather than plugs but it's essentially the same.

Re: Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API

#343

Post by xxpor »

paulgerhardt wrote: post #234

Partially responsible for this. (Sold Lockitron to Chamberlain in 2017 which became the basis for Amazon Key integrations.) Contrary to the popular sentiment in a lot of the comments here, there’s not much value in the analytics. As we all painfully found out in the 2010’s, there are only two viable recurring revenue streams in the IoT space - charging for video storage and charging for commercial access. Chamberlain…

If anything, Chamberlain should be paying Amazon for the right to be included with Key. It drives sales to Chamberlain.

Re: Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API

#344

Post by criddell »

gosub100 wrote: post #316
lexh wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, data collection. And subscriptions. This makes sense (and myQ’s privacy policy is a nightmare: https://www.myq.com/privacy-notice ) but I’ve never understood how this particular bit of data is valuable to anyone. Any ideas?

No direct experience, just my guesses * someone who drives frequently may rank higher for automotive products and services * use to independently rank other statistics, i.e. someone with kids probably comes and goes more than a single person or non-child-rearing couple. Take the dataset where you know they have kids (and myQ) and see if you can detect the ones with kids using only myQ data (plus other statistics). If…

Plus some of their door openers have a camera and microphone. From that they could get a lot more very specific data.

Re: Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API

#345

Post by pjsg »

twicetwice wrote: post #199
giancarlostoro wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not... just allow HA receive callback events at that point when things change? I feel like this has an easy resolve that doesn't piss off your power user customers, and makes them encourage others to invest in your products, IE power users, and they'll come back because despite being a little extra engineering effort, they were glad you thought of them.

Good suggestion, but where and how does HA receive callbacks? I would guess that almost all HA instances are behind residential LANs and most aren't accessible on the public internet. You could use dynamic DNS and forward ports, but that's flaky, you might run into CGNAT, etc. And anyway, it's best if your HA instance isn't publicly addressable; mine is only accessible over my personal WireGuard VPN and I intend to k…

MQTT is the solution for this. Note that the garage door openers talk MQTT to the myq service (over TLS with preshared keys). It should be possible to subscribe to events from your garage door opener(s) and also to send commands to it.

Re: Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API

#346

Post by seanalltogether »

Nextgrid wrote: post #327
paulgerhardt wrote: post #234

Partially responsible for this. (Sold Lockitron to Chamberlain in 2017 which became the basis for Amazon Key integrations.) Contrary to the popular sentiment in a lot of the comments here, there’s not much value in the analytics. As we all painfully found out in the 2010’s, there are only two viable recurring revenue streams in the IoT space - charging for video storage and charging for commercial access. Chamberlain…

Why should the garage door manufacturer take a cut if a third-party wants to use/access my garage door (which sells for real money and isn't advertised as a rental). If a homeowner wants to let Amazon, Walmart, etc to open their garage door, it should be up to him to provide them with an access token/secret/etc to enter, just like you can put a door keycode in the order notes. The interaction should be purely between…

1. Company wants to sell an iot product.

2. Through research they find user wants to interact with their smart device while outside of range of wifi/bluetooth.

3. Company builds device firmware and cloud infrastructure to support this goal.

4. Company wants to simplify business logic and doesn't provide local (wifi/bluetooth/zigbee) support. Online only can service both on-premise and off-premise.

5. Company needs to reduce costs and justify ongoing operational costs of supporting this cloud + device service.

6. We arrive at the current solution.

Re: Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API

#347

Post by criddell »

ryukoposting wrote: post #116
a254613e wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main reason why HA accounted for so many requests is probably because it was a polling integration, requesting data every 30 seconds from the server, while the official app either had push events when something changes, or it updated state when the app gets opened.

Isn't the high road solution here to open your API to enable users to make a less shitty HA integration? Either way, they'll almost certainly pull the plug on this service sometime before the end of the decade.

That’s definitely the high road solution. The low road solution would have been to start suing HA users under the CFAA. So I guess they took the middle road.

Re: Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API

#348

Post by pjsg »

ttcbj wrote: post #142
bitshiftfaced wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they want you to install their app so that you have to open the app everytime you press the button. From there, you see ads to other products.

I use the myq app to open my garage door open regularly. The app is slow to open and generally annoying. For example, the whole interface is initially blocked, so you tap to open and it doesn't register the tap, still doesn't register the tap, then finally it does. I was not aware of there being ads in it, but I just looked, and you are absolutely right, there is an ad at the top. It looks like its for their home sec…

Yeah -- it is certainly quicker to use the keypad that I have outside the garage door than try and use their app. In particular, it keeps asking me for a username and password (which I can't remember because who remembers 16 character strings??).

I just want to get local access to my openers.

Re: Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API

#349

Post by thfuran »

kelnos wrote: post #292
bluGill wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For retailers I want someone to verify that they are legitimate. I don't want random people in my garage. If someone enters my garage when I'm not home they better really be agents for WalMart/Amazon/target/UPS (as opposed to WolMort/Amozan/targit/USP...) , and whatever company does that does background checks on drivers. Probably they also need to have other cameras in their vehicles so that drivers trying to steal…

> as already pointed out, most people have an unlocked door from the garage to the house Not sure where you live, but every house I've lived in (USA, a few different states) during my entire life has had an exterior-quality door with exterior-quality lock, including deadbolt, between the house and garage. In the one house I lived in that had a security system, that garage-to-interior door was also wired into the syst…

>every house I've lived in (USA, a few different states) during my entire life has had an exterior-quality door with exterior-quality lock, including deadbolt, between the house and garage.

Sure, but I've probably locked it barely more than twice.

Re: Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API

#350

Post by teachrdan »

mindslight wrote: post #276
cogman10 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like bait and switch to me, which is illegal. You can report this action to the ftc https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/#/

Especially that it was a new company deliberately disabling the devices, it sounds like a straightforward criminal CFAA violation. Of course, such laws are really only for persecuting little guys doing uppity things like trying to make scientific knowledge available to the public. Even if you could convince any six-degrees-of-golf-buddies prosecutor to take the case, I'm sure the malicious crackers have some fake con…

I wonder if you could take them to small claims court. That's a potentially useful remedy, although pretty much everywhere, if they lose in small claims they can appeal it to regular civil court and make it prohibitively expensive to fight them.
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