back in 2019 i took my 1980s garage door
opener which used to work like this and made it smart meaning that i could
control it with my phone unfortunately while it worked perfectly at the time
the two years that followed have been less than stellar to say the least see
look here's the board we were using it's not in there anymore is it
fortunately today i think we finally have the
ultimate solution and since this video is sponsored by pulseway that should
give you some idea as to what the solution is
for those of you who are a little slow it's a server
it's always a server isn't it Jake
when i bought this house it still had the original garage door openers from
the 1980s so when i wanted to add some kind of smart remote control
functionality to it the most obvious solution was to just replace them so i
went on amazon and bought a smart chamberlain garage door opener with the
intention of installing it myself only to read through the documentation and
realize that it was a one dollar a month subscription fee for if this and that
integration so i could use my google assistant a dollar a month i was
outraged i'm not paying a subscription fee so instead i spent a whole year
subscription worth of money on this cheap chinese relay thing that connects
to your wi-fi and will actually press the button just by bridging the contacts
for you and as i said before it worked perfectly i'd give my voice command it
would go through my if this than that recipe and then click click it would
activate the door the only non-ideal thing was that this has no way of
knowing if the garage door is open or closed but that was easy enough to
install with a little roost device or with a garage security camera only it's
traumatic to think about that time now because that's when the first major
thing went wrong i had the audacity to replace my wireless access point i went
from my ruckus one to my Ubiquiti one which should have been fine except that
my relay wouldn't connect to the new access point even after i changed the
ssid and the password to exactly the same one
no problem i thought i've seen that before all i gotta do is a factory
resell my god there is no way to factory reset this
thing you actually just have to throw it away if you don't remember to change the
credentials on it before you change your wi-fi so that's okay i went and bought a
more expensive and feature-rich four-channel sawn off one and it was
back to working perfectly until
it will open the vault garage door
one day it randomly stopped working
after some quick googling it turns out that e we link stopped allowing if this
than that integration free of charge which after i threw a temper tantrum on
twitter i found out was because if this and that changed their billing policies
making it so that e we link had to pay far more per user
i had a call with if this and that ceo where it was off the record
unfortunately so i can't really share all the details but ultimately they
walked me through how if this and that is to survive they basically have to
make some kind of change and they feel like allowing individual users for free
to create up to three recipes of their own and then use an unlimited number of
other already existing recipes seems like a reasonable middle ground
unfortunately for me that means that something as simple as
open odyssey garage door closed odyssey garage door open bolt garage door and
close volt garage door exceeds the freaking limit no bother said i i will
just change all of the voice commands to activate odyssey garage door and
activate volt garage door since quite frankly the relay stupid doodad whether
it's this one or the sonoff has no idea if it's open or closed anyway it was
just kind of like a user friendliness thing then it really hit the fan my
ancient garage door opener that i had spent all this freaking time smartifying
outright died so when i called a local garage
door installer company because frankly i didn't feel like installing it myself
they basically said look there's only like one unit that we install and
everything so either you take it or you don't and i kind of went yeah okay sure
i come home from work and sure enough there it is a brand new lift master and
those of you who know anything about the industry will probably know that like
eyeglass frames the garage door opener industry is basically a monopoly and
liftmaster is owned by you guessed it chamberlain the company that i was
trying to freaking avoid because of their subscription fee in the first
place no problem said i i'll just take
the same leads off of my relay and plonk them onto the back of the wall unit just
like before no subscription fee for me is what i thought but the installer
explains to me this was very helpful that these smart garage door openers no
longer actually work the way the old ones did where they just pretty much
closed a circuit these ones are only powered by the wires in your wall and
instead they actually transmit wirelessly to the garage door opener
units just like the fob that you have in your car
so you can't use a relay in the way that you used to where you just kind of well
bridge the contacts at the back
not to be defeated i quickly grabbed one
of the pcbs out of a wall unit and
soldered some leads of my own to the activation switch so that
effectively my relay going off was just
pushing the same switch that i would normally push with my finger
genius too bad the system worked too well
i sent this video over to maddie from electroboom showing that while my google
voice assistant commands to open and close the door did in fact work with my
soldered leads here unfortunately the garage door would also just randomly
activate itself he explained it to me and it's something
to do with analog circuitry and having a very high level of sensitivity to
electromagnetic interference essentially what it means is that these
wires coming off of the switch were acting as antennas and triggering it
sometimes repeatedly in the middle of the night i mean that's a bit of a
security problem don't you think with guidance from eddie i salvaged some
capacitors and resistors from a random donor board that i had kicking around
and attempted to put some kind of filtering on this circuit in order to
prevent it from happening but after spending an entire afternoon on it i
thought you know what enough's enough my wife will not get off
my case about how the garage doors don't freaking work properly
i'm just going to use chamberlain's own myq software how bad can it be
terrible it turns out so here's my current setup then with the
chamberlain myq app you can from anywhere in the world see the status of
your garage doors how long they've been in that state so here you can see the
volt's been open for four minutes and you can activate them either way
what's so bad about that that sounds pretty great well a couple of things for
starters it constantly logs both me and
my wife out seemingly whenever our ip
address changes like oh i don't know say for example when we're just coming into
wi-fi at home or just leaving the range of our wi-fi and switching over to
cellular data that seems like a pretty small problem and lioness you might say
i mean why are you pulling out your phone anyway this whole journey freaking
started because you wanted to open and close your garage door with a voice
command why not just use my q's integration with
if this than that which by the way they don't charge a dollar a month for
anymore they now provide it for free well i'll tell you why because it only
allows you to close the door when i get
home at the end of the day i cannot say okay people open the garage door
it doesn't allow it through if this and that so i'm stuck with one of the
following a a relay that randomly opens my garage
doors and does randomly close them as well so that's good that's a good
feature b an app that constantly logs me out so
i have to log into it in my driveway in order to go home to my house or see a
voice assistant that only closes the doors but does not open them oh right
also there is d i could just use the stupid fob thing that goes on your visor
like a normal human being but
it's a huge security problem to keep those things in your car and quite
frankly i cannot be arsed to like carry
it around with me all the time so i know i'll end up leaving it in my car which
is how people break into your house so what this whole experience has highlighted
for me is a couple of the big problems with smart home stuff in general
one is unexpected service interruptions or policy changes that can brick already
perfectly functioning setups and number two is poor or incomplete
interoperability between different brands and platforms
now there's only so much we can do about the first one terms of service can
change but at least for the second thing there actually is a solution and it's
called home assistant conveniently i
already have a home server that's perfectly capable of running docker
containers or virtual machines already running on raid so we're going to show
you guys the steps that we went through to get home assistant up and running now
what we're doing with it today is pretty basic taking a myq device and having it
work with google assistant but there is so much that you can do with this that
we are barely even scratching the surface it's super cool
in a nutshell home assistant is an open source home automation platform it's
kind of like if this than that except that you can host it yourself and it's a
lot more versatile basically if you can dream it or well at least
program it it's doable with home assistant our first home assistant
inspired solution was based around using my existing sonoff inching relay opener
and then a cheap zigbee hub and a door sensor the idea was that after issuing
our chosen voice command through google assistant home assistant would run a
little script in the background to check the door status and then decide whether
or not to trigger the garage that would be to prevent me from accidentally
opening a garage door that was already open which would actually close it and
vice versa now this is a great configuration
because it relies on fewer cloud services but for me the whole zigbee
thing is a rabbit hole that i'm not ready to go down
yet partly because i don't have to it turns out that the fancy new garage
door openers that i splurged on have a direct integration thanks to home
assistant with support for opening the door
which really makes those other limitations seem pretty frustrating and
arbitrary doesn't it it'll just take some setting up first
off because of the way google assistant works a few things need to be in place
for it to be able to access your self-hosted home assistant instance
first you'll need a domain name that you can use so google knows where to look
second you'll need an ssl certificate set up for that domain for security and
third you'll need remote access to that instance by way of port forwarding
luckily for us there are a few ways that we can make this a lot easier than it
sounds but for those of you who don't want to dabble in all this techno
wizardry there is a workaround that avoids all of it as well as helping with
the security concerns of having your home assistant instance being public
facing it's called home assistant cloud it's a partnered service run by the
founder of home assistant where they host it in the cloud for you and then
you can actually just tie it into google assistant directly without any annoying
manual configuration however that means that you are again relying on a cloud
service to host it as well as paying a bloody subscription which was what i was
trying to avoid so here comes the more
diy fun way to do it featuring my unraid
nas let's check that out real quick this is my combination home nas and server so
it's got about 60 terabytes of storage which is more than i need at least for
my personal projects 14 core processor 64 gigs of RAM and
naturally it's running pulse wave for monitoring so i can keep tabs on it have
remote access and of course get notifications if anything goes wrong to
help you guys follow along a full text tutorial on the Linus tech tips forum
will be linked in the video description because it is simply too much to fit
into a video first up snag a domain from your favorite registrar for the purposes
of this video we'll be using autopilot to nowhere.com if you have a static ip
just set it in your dns provider but if your ip is dynamic that means changing
you'll need to set up dynamic dns or a program that updates your dns record
when your ip changes since our domain is managed through cloudflare the unread
community app cloudflare ddns works perfectly for this then to proxy our
local home assistant instance into a public-facing domain and to handle the
free automatically renewing ssl certificate we will use another
community app called nginx proxy manager before we can set up the ssl certificate
in it though we'll need to set up our port forwarding rules so that we can actually verify that we own the domain
this is going to vary based on your router so use your google foo if you
aren't familiar but in the Ubiquiti control panel anyway it's super easy
note by the way you'll want to make sure that your unraid nas or other machine
that's running all this gear actually has a static local ip otherwise those
poor forwarding rules that you set up could just break unexpectedly back in
the proxy manager set up your ssl certificate as well as the host proxy
with your domain and bam we install home assistant and we can
access it remotely the sky is now officially the limit
but like really with home assistant you could make it uh
turn off all your lights when all paired devices leave a geofenced location like
your house or you could have it turn on your sprinklers for you at a certain
time unless your moisture sensor in your yard has detected rain or if you don't
feel like one of those you can also just integrate it with the local weather report or you could make a sawn off
button work with a yi light bulb the possibilities are endless in our
case we're just simply going to link my garage door openers myq program to home
assistant and then set up google assistant integration this is a pretty
long process for self-hosted peeps so follow the instructions linked in the
description for that but once it's set up we can add it directly to our google
home app and boom two garages
yes so it's all working in theory
what about in practice okay nerd open both garages
it finally works
oh man i know right so
big thank you to you for watching thank you to Jake for fixing my garage again
and of course thank you to pulseway for
sponsoring this video pulse way if you guys aren't familiar is the solution to
monitoring your systems and your servers they've got support for Windows mac and
Linux and they allow you to see all kinds of important steps on your systems
like what the CPU usage is RAM usages storage basic stuff like that but also
apply custom scripts roll updates and remotely access your machines and all of
that stuff can be done from the comfort of your lawn chair through their mobile
apps available for iOS and Android so
naturally i use pulseway for all kinds of things to let me know if my server is
down or unresponsive or if my storage is reaching a critical level but you can
use it for basically anything so learn more at the link down below and check
out pulseway for yourself even personal users can actually get a lot of benefit
so guys do go check it out if you guys enjoyed this video and you
want the full history of how this got started maybe check out the original
where we smartified my og 1985 garage
door openers it's like a disk it's so slow i hate
that but because we're using the myq integration there's no getting around it
when i was just using the relay i didn't have to wait for that
yeah so if i could still use the relay honestly i would
but this is fine