Hire someone to stand by your garage door and push the clicker for you when they see you approach by car or by foot.

Let me guess, you are under 35 years old and pushing a button is a real pain for you.

 

Hire someone to stand by your garage door and push the clicker for you when they see you approach by car or by foot.

Let me guess, you are under 35 years old and pushing a button is a real pain for you.

Twisted humor, I like that.

Ron

 

Twisted humor, I like that.

Ron

Who knows, if it works out, the guy could ride along to any destination and stand next to the car in a parking lot to lock/unlock the car doors as the OP leaves/approaches.

I might patent this idea. Maybe I'll start a service business to lease out some people to push buttons for millennials.

 

Who knows, if it works out, the guy could ride along to any destination and stand next to the car in a parking lot to lock/unlock the car doors as the OP leaves/approaches.

I might patent this idea. Maybe I'll start a service business to lease out some people to push buttons for millennials.

Absolutely a good investment opportunity.

Ron

 

Absolutely a good investment opportunity.

Ron

First round funding starts next week. Get in on the ground floor and invest early. I'll PM you instructions on how to transfer funds. If you've ever done work with a Nigerian Prince, the process may seem familiar.

 

Bluetooth has come up 2 or 3 times...

 

Bluetooth has come up 2 or 3 times...

Doesn't Bluetooth have a very limited range? Before retiring I kept more abreast of this stuff.

Ron

 

I don't really know of an out-of-box solution for this (I guess you wouldn't really be expecting one to come from this site anyway), but it can be done! If you want interaction-free proximity detection, you could try a solution using iBeacon or Android Beacon ( even or another BLE beacon-based approach). The nice thing about BLE beacons is the APIs are usually optimized for the detector to just wait for the presence of a broadcaster on a pre-registered list of ones you are interested in, then it fires up into a more active scanning mode to assess the signal strength and fetch specific information that you can then use decide when/what to trigger next. You can use the signal strength as a threshold to determine the proximity in which you want actions to actually trigger.
There are plenty of different types of beacon hardware out there including battery-operated, weatherproof, and even keychain-dongle sized options. You can also set up many project boards with bluetooth hardware or shields to act as a beacon broadcaster or detector.

There are still multiple ways to do what you want, even once you have settled on using a BLE beacon solution since it involves two parts: a broadcaster and the detector.

1. You could have the broadcaster be by the garage or the area in which you want to trigger the garage, and the detector could be your phone since you will probably always have it on you anyway.
   • PROS
     • The triggering beacon can be easily placed in a convenient location and run off of a battery.
     • There are phone apps available already so you can get this setup without too much effort.
     • Your phone is the "key", which would be easier for you to control access to and therefore harder to compromise.
   • CONS
     • You will have to replace the batteries on your beacon periodically and it may not be easy to anticipate when they are/will be low.
     • You will still need some sort of solution for remotely opening the garage door from your phone.
       
     • Most of the readily-available apps I can find that let you trigger an action based on beacon proximity can't do anything much more sophisticated than send a GET request to a URL, so you may have to have a relatively insecure URL-based triggering method for opening your garage door. You could try to mitigate it somewhat by having the URL only be exposed on a wifi-network that your phone would be connected to while in the triggering area.
2. You could buy/make a portable broadcaster that you carry or look into making your phone the broadcaster, and set up a board in the garage that is both the detector AND the controller that opens your garage door.
   • PROS
     • You kill two birds with one stone: your proximity solution and your garage opening solution are done with the same set of hardware.
     • No need to expose your opener through a URL that might get hacked.
     • Could avoid needing to replace batteries periodically since you could run the detector/controller on a power supply in the garage (assuming you succeed in setting up the phone as a broadcaster which may or may not be possible depending on if you use Android vs. iOS).
   • CONS
     • The beacon detector has to be wired up to your garage door which limits where you can place it and therefore limits your ability to optimize the trigger area/distance for your convenience.
     • You are essentially leaving the "key" in the garage. Since the beacon detector looks for metadata in a public broadcast coming from the broadcaster it wouldn't be too difficult for someone to just skim that public broadcast and mimic it from their own device. They could then essentially activate the key/trigger later without you or your phone present.
       • (It may be possible to have hardware address whitelist that the beacon detector uses to confirm the public broadcast came from an authorized device)

I haven't done a setup like this for my garage door, but I did do something similar for the access gate at an apartment I used to live at. I went with option 1: I wired up a momentary relay to the button on our intercom buzzer that opens the latch on the front gate and then I placed a broadcasting iBeacon inside my mailbox which was right outside the front gate. At the time there weren't really any iBeacon apps out there that did more than list nearby beacons, so I wrote my own app that triggered the relay via my home automation server when entering the proximity of the beacon. It worked like magic: I could walk up to the gate with my phone in my pocket, and as I approached the gate would automatically buzz me in. I even extended the setup by putting another beacon outside my front door, and watching for the order in which the beacons were detected. If the front door beacon was detected within a minute or so before the front gate beacon, it would assume I was approaching the gate to exit from the inside and would avoid triggering the buzzer.

 

I don't really know of an out-of-box solution for this (I guess you wouldn't really be expecting one to come from this site anyway)

Really? Why not? Please share your one-day's worth of wisdom about the site.

ak

 

I love reading all these comments but mostly like to stay silent when I really don't have an answer. Sometimes people wish I'd remain silent, but once in a while I come up with something that starts people thinking in a different direction. Honestly not knowing much about this subject I'm reluctant to say anything, but if I were to think up an approach I'd go with an IR transmitter mounted on the car so that when an IR receiver sees my signal (powered by the cars electrical system, not a phone, which sometimes may be dead - (my wife's phone often)). Drive up and the IR Receiver opens the door. A timer can close the door 30 seconds (or longer) after the door was opened.

As for walking up - you'd need a Lapel Pin with an IR transmitter. Battery and circuitry in your pocket. You walk up, the door opens, you get in the car, start it and drive out. Say it takes 90 seconds to accomplish that. Two minutes after the door opened the door closes.

The only inconvenience I can see with that system is that when you change clothes you have to put the lapel pin on whatever you're wearing.

My garage door has a row of windows. I'd mount the IR receiver on the window so that when the door opens the receiver is pointed up at the ceiling and can not see any signals.

One thing I DO have on my garage door opener system is a switch that detects when the door is fully open. There's a clock timer that can be programmed for 20 different times. It's originally used to turn lights on and off at set times of the day, but it can be programmed to turn on at a given hour and minute and turn off at as short as a minute later. Sometimes my wife leaves for work and forgets to close the door. Since I know she leaves at a particular time I have it set to switch on at 10 minutes after she leaves. If she's running late I've also programmed it to close 15, 20 and 30 minutes after she leaves. I don't remember all the safeguards I put in place on that system but it works well. If I'm out in the garage and I want the door to stay open I just close it slightly so that the switch is off. But when the door is fully open the timer will turn on for a minute and close a 12 VDC [edited] relay, acting like the hard wired door switch and send the door back down. If something blocks the safety beams the door reverses because there's a second switch to detect when the door has begun to move. Once the second switch opens the relay is blocked from engaging again unless the door is fully open when the initial signal comes on. I'd have to search my documents to find that schematic. Later today (or tomorrow) I'll see if I can find it and post it.

 

Apparently I mis-spoke about how my system for automatically closing the door IF OPEN. I used a 12 volt DC power supply and a couple relays. The reason for two relays is so that if something is blocking the beam the door will not try to close down on the blockage. Holding the button (which is what the relay would do for 1 minute - or repeatedly try to close the door) would force the door to close regardless of whether the safety beams detected something or not. Should they malfunction - holding the button will still close the door. Hence, the need for a way to de-trigger the system. K2 does exactly that. Once the door starts its closing process, K2 turns on and latches out K1 so that the door will not try to close again. Only when the system times out will K2 open, which will allow K1 to operate like a door button IF the door is open. Every day, several times a day K2 closes for one minute at a time. No big deal.

 

What about multiple garage doors for parking spaces that can be accessed by all people that live in a building? Is it possible to have no interference between side-by-side doors?

A guy who works in a company here in my town said that there were interference problems and there was no way to do it.

Is that correct?

 

Wonder why there is no "retail solution" to this problem?

Probably because all the "solutions" end up having side effects that are much worse than the problem they intend to solve.

 

I have two garage doors side by side. I can open one or the other or both at the same time. Well, that's only two doors. My mother-in-law lived in a complex with dozens of doors near by. She never had any problems. I never heard of other people having problems. And they installed cheap systems.

If you know you're going to access your door at certain times you can put the opener on a timer so that the door can not be opened except at those times. As long as there's a door you can open with a key you can always get in there and flip a switch and open your door.

I think someone is just telling you it's a problem because they don't want to do the work to solve it. How do you get calls on your cell phone without affecting mine when I'm standing right beside you? Hey! There you go! Get a GDO that can be opened and closed by your cell phone.