Overengineer your garage door with your Raspberry Pi!
Use a Raspberry Pi to open or close your garage door and to sense whether it's currently open. You can do this from the comfort of your couch or anywhere in the world (with an appropriate VPN connection). Your spouse may think you're crazy, but it's so cool!
I started with this guide by Chris Driscoll at Driscosity. Chris has an awesome guide with step-by-step instructions, pictures, and even a video of the system in operation. I use this same hardware setup for GaragePi.
What he has is great for a simple opener and status display, but the second time I used it my relay got stuck closed because of a connection issue (it's javascript based). I also wanted more features and more control over what was going on.
So I wrote a Flask app (Python) with some JSON/jQuery for keeping the status updated. I also used Bootstrap for the front end. All these are new to me so forgive / correct any noob mistakes.
GaragePi now supports IFTTT alerts through the new Maker Channel. It will generate events when an open or close is detected and even at a designated time.
See below for alert details and how to set them up.
I also pulled the app into two parts, one for the webserver and one that's always running and talking to the RPi. This makes it so the webserver doesn't have to run with root privileges. More importantly, this also enables a whole lot of other features that require running all the time instead of just within a web request.
I'm definitely planning on getting these done.
Okay, I might never implement these, but here are some ideas for what would make it even better (read more overengineered).
Run the fully automated installer by running this command logged into your Raspberry Pi.
curl -s "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nathanpjones/GaragePi/master/setup/online_install.sh" | bash
(If you want to know what's going on, here are the full contents of online_install.sh and then setup.sh that is called next.)
It will take a while for the setup scripts to run, but at the end you should be able to access your site at your Raspberry Pi's IP address.
The online install will put everything in ~/garage_pi
. Look to the instance
subfolder for the app logs and the
database.
If you want to pull down the repo manually (recommended if you want to choose where to install), all you have to do is navigate to the project root folder and run the following command.
source setup/setup.sh
The app configuration file is found in instance/app.cfg
.
cd ~/garage_site
.nano instance/app.cfg
to open the config file.PASSWORD
field and change it from the default to something unique for you. You may also change the
login USERNAME
if you like.RELAY_PIN
and REED_PIN
if your hardware configuration differs from the Driscosity setup.I've included an uninstall script. You can run it with the following command.
source setup/uninstall.sh
This isn't a complete uninstall because I don't keep track of everything you had installed when you started. It does remove the GaragePi related services and lets you know what else you might want to remove.
Once you've run the uninstall script, it's safe to simply delete the project root folder.
rm -rf ~/garage_pi
GaragePi supports generating IFTTT events using the Maker Channel.
garage_door_opened
- Fired when door is openedgarage_door_closed
- Fired when door is closedgarage_door_changed
- Fired when door is opened or closed. Value1
is set to either opened
or closed
.garage_door_warning
- Fired when door is open at a given time of day. Value1
is set to open
. To enable IFTTT events, you must first obtain your maker key. You should see listed on the front page of the Maker Channel.
instance/app.cfg
IFTTT_MAKER_KEY
and input your maker key between the single quotes. It should
look something like, IFTTT_MAKER_KEY = 'c-jfLKBJEfijas3r28VBL'
DOOR_OPEN_WARNING_TIME
to the desired time. Make sure to use 24-hour
format with just hours and seconds, for example, DOOR_OPEN_WARNING_TIME = "18:30"