Garage Door Monitor

Projects
#1

I just integrated a garage door monitor with an imp and I have to say I’m very satisfied with the results. I used a chamberlain garage door monitor ($19 at amazon) and a Imp with a April board to detect the status (open/closed)

The monitor has 15V so hooking it up to the april converter powered it perfectly. The only trick thing (which wasn’t that trick) was the ‘open’ signal I pick up is off the LED and the most convenient pin is either 5V (garage door open) or 2.2V (garage door closed). I did a small resister divider to get it to < 3.3V and used an analog pin to decide which state it was int.

I’m still playing with software, it’s pretty simple right now and mostly logging to cosmo but the one tricky thing was my first version was waking up the up way too often to check status and I think all of that activity was interferring with the RF signal used to detect garage door state (the first 12 hours I went live I kept on knocking the monitor off line in the sense that it thought it couldn’t detect the remote portion)

After a quick sw change to have the imp wake up and check less often and spend less time frantically uploading status to the server fixed it – It’s worked prefectly since I made that change (almost 24 hours now)

A few more details & pictures are in some google+ posts

https://plus.google.com/u/0/102790073222983779908/posts/gUbtr8vuDmi
https://plus.google.com/u/0/102790073222983779908/posts/AnAnpYxfgta
https://plus.google.com/u/0/102790073222983779908/posts/EgchJMATHNu

#2

Sounds like a fun project. I guess I would just use a couple of magnetic sensors on the door track and stick the april card in a plastic box and mount to the opener … utilizing some power from the opener circuitboard. Likewise, the imp can also command open or close plus some security lighting, all done from a website with a password login.

You could even sense if a car was in it’s parking place.

And using physical switches / sensors also is also more reliable than the remote door monitor that could die or fail to detect the correct door position.

#3

Yes – I considered doing something like that (sense the garage door on myown)

I like this approach however because the actual unit works without an imp as it always did – I haves it in the kitchen and my family can just glance over and see the state – the imp provides a level of automation (e.g. I can text myself if it’s open after 9:00PM)

-John

#4

Yes, I see what you mean. That’s a nice touch.