Garage Door Opener

One of my biggest fears is leaving the garage door open. This happened one time and it wasn’t that fun. Let me get into this.

Garage door

Yes, we left the garage door open one time, most likely it was being shut and some stupid cat ran in and the door went back up. We had a lot of stuff stolen from the garage.

• Kids scooters
• Soda
• TV
• My backpack from my car
• Both car regressions
• CD’s  
• Camp Chairs
• Tools
• Po, a Teletubbie that was left in my car.
• Check book
• A Credit card
• All the stuff in my Backpack
  • Luckily I got the laptop out of the car

So some kids who weren’t raised right, and needed to steal what other people work for. Yea, don’t get me started.

So this has been a pain in my butt for a long time. Something that I wanted a handle on. I even came home one day with the garage door up. Even when we put it down. I even dragged a network cable out to the garage door opener, I was looking to the future. Thinking that at one point I could afford to hook up my garage door to my network. Yes, my neighbor did it with a raspberry PI (something for a different time)

Smart Home

So now finally, I can rest at peace and not be so stressed about the stupid door being up. We got some new garage door openers that are WIFI enabled. Yes, you have heard that right, we got a WiFi-enabled garage door so that I know when the door is up or down. It evens notifies me when the door is open. Nice peace of mind.

WIFI enabled.

What did I get, so we got some openers with the WIFI and this means that I can use my phone to check on my doors. I can open and close them from the app. So nice to finally have a garage door that I can control from my phone. I would prefer it to be connected via Cat 6 network cable, a little bit better harder to hack and a lot faster than WIFI. There is that lag. I might have to put an extender in the laundry room, good thing I thought ahead.

APP

Here is what the app looks like

You can click on the door you want and it brings you to this screen

As you see from the picture above^^ you have

• Door history
  • IT will show you who opened it like
    • Mobile app
    • Garage door button on the wall
    • The date and time it happened
• Rules
  • You can set this up to do certain things
    • It is limited to what it can do
• People with Virtual keys
  • You can set up a member of the family that can open and close the door at any time of day or night
  • You can set up a temporary or even a recurring access for the garage door.
    • For babysitters
    • Dog walkers
    • Service People

My thoughts

Finally, I can get my garage door under control, to a point. I can’t help it if the internet goes out, the power goes out, you know stuff like that. Yes if the power goes out, I can’t open up my door anyway. But I can’t close it correctly as well. But, it does what I want it to. It puts my mind at ease. I can look and see if the door is closed anywhere I have an internet connection. Makes it better for me.

The ability to set rules up to help keep that peace of mind. I use it quite often as it is nice to have the ability to do this.

The only issue I have is I can’t connect this to “Alexa” due of my username or password is wrong. Can’t figure out which one it is. So that is something I will have to figure out.