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Internet-Enabled Garage Door Opener

Remotely open a garage door using an API call rather than a near-range 900MHz door remote

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The garage door has become my front door. It seems that whenever I'm far away either someone accidentally leaves it open or needs access to get inside. It would be great to be able to open and close the door without buying expensive hardware or upgrading the opener itself.

Using a $12 programmable remote and a spare Raspberry Pi, you can create a garage door opener that responds over GPIO and can be triggered by remote commands.

I wanted to open/close my garage door programatically, so I picked up the cheapest Genie garage remote I could find thinking I would desolder the pushbutton and replace it with a programmatic switch. To avoid the battery draining, I thought I could also solder leads to replace the CR2032 battery and just use the 3V line from a Raspberry Pi or the like.

When the garage remote arrived and I opened up the case I discovered four empty pinouts. By just eyeballing the traces you could tell one was the 3V power and the other was ground. After a probing the remaining two buttons I found that, despite this being sold as a single-button remote, this was actually a three-button garage door remote with a pushbutton traced to only the first remote "button." The other two pins were for the other two remote buttons - so I could easily connect one of the two open pins to ground and "press" the second or third button.

The board itself was about the same size as a mini breadboard. I soldered pins on for power, ground, and one of the door buttons. I used jumper wires and an old MOSFET to build a simple switch that would connect the button pin to ground.

With this three wire setup you could use the Flipper Zero's GPIO features & default app to connect +3V power, ground, and send a 2V GPIO signal. A button press on the Flipper Zero will open the gate on the FET, power the remote, and "press" a button.

To allow for a remote connection over the internet, I connected power/ground/button leads to an old Raspberry Pi which polls an AWS SQS queue to watch for inbound messages. I used the SQLGateway Serverless application to receiving remote API commands, convert them to messages, then drop them on the SQS queue so the Raspberry Pi doesn't have to be public facing or have an open port.

With an old Raspberry Pi, a sub-$12 garage remote, and an AWS account you can click a garage door remote with an HTTP POST command.

  • 1
    Sync the door remote to the garage door opener

    Follow manufacturer instructions on sync'ing your new door remote with the garage door opener - make sure you test it out before you begin.

  • 2
    Prep the garage door remote

    Open the outer casing of the ASONPAO IntelliCode remote, remove the board (it has no screws - it should lift out), and remove the CR2032 battery. Next to the button you should see four open pin holes: the one with the white box drawn around it and the thicker lead is the Vcc pin - we can consider that PIN0. Next to it is PIN1 - that is ground. The two farther to the right in the image are PIN2 (door button #2) and PIN3 (door button #3).

    Solder pins into the open sockets for PIN0, PIN1, and PIN2. You can solder a lead for PIN3 if you like and have room on the breadboard.

  • 3
    Wire the breadboard

    This step could go any number of ways - I chose to use a mini breadboard & jumper wires to the three pins soldered onto the remote.

    PIN0 will go to a 3V wire, PIN1 to ground, and PIN2 to the drain of a MOSFET I had sitting around. The source of the MOSFET is ground (shared with PIN1), and the gate will be a wire to a GPIO pin on either a Flipper Zero or Raspberry Pi.

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