IOT Garage Door Opener Makes For Excellent Beginner IOT Project

If you live in a home with a garage door opener, you may have experienced one or more inevitable moments. You pull up to your home, you press the button on the garage door opener, and… nothing. Or you can’t find the garage door opener. Or you have to mash the button repeatedly to get a response. Or… you get the idea. Thanks to [Core Electronics] however, you now have the basis for using a much better device to control your own garage door: Your phone. You can see the tutorial on the web or in video format below the break.

[Michael] at [Core electronics] was tired of dealing with the inconsistencies and inconveniences of a poorly built remote for his garage door opener. When he inspected the controller board on the garage door opener itself, he found that it was already configured to allow three buttons to be connected: Up, Down, and Stop.

Realizing that a MOSFET can be configured as a switch, [Michael] built a circuit with three such devices and then connected them to the Raspberry Pi Pico W. Some MicroPython code does the needful, and now [Michael] can access the controls from a website on his phone. Nifty!

We also appreciated that the tutorial gives a full view of the project so that a beginning hacker can decide whether this is the project for them, and it discusses some of the security aspects of making your garage door and IOT device. Well done!

Given the warnings in the video, we wonder if [Michael] also saw the Hackaday article “The Trials And Tribulations of Building An IOT Garage Door Opener” from 2019.

Thanks to [Graham] for the great tip!