Pi Garage

Pi Garage is an Open Source solution for turning an old garage door into a smart garage door.

Why build a smart garage door?

I decided to build Pi Garage for multiple reasons. First was that in our household we were always unable to find the remote controls for the garage door. True story we started with three. One went through the wash twice and was ruined, and with one in the house and one in the car it meant that as the car is normally locked you couldn’t easily go out of the garage.

I know first world problems right?

At the same time I had been starting down the smart home path with some LIFX light globes and some TPLink smart power sockets. I thought wouldn’t it be great to make my basic garage door a smart garage door (and for others to do the same).

As a large supporter of Open Source software I had always intended do make my hobby projects Open Source as much as possible but at the time of starting this project I had just moved jobs. One thing that became apparent during the interview process is that it’s kinda hard to show what you have worked on or things to show your experience when you have signed a Non Disclosure Agreement with the current company you work for. I mean which company likes giving away it’s company secrets right?

I made the decision that as much as helping me with a project to do (and share with others) I would make this Open Source as much as possible to that I could demo this to my peers when required. I had no idea how much more complex an Open Source project would be yet (but I would soon find out).

Links

Check out the GitHub repo or the documentation for more information.

Integrations

Home Assistant

By designing Pi Garage to use an API this means that any 3rd party system can integrate easily. Before I had published the mobile apps I used Home Assistant to connect to the Pi Garage backend. See here for details on doing this. In the video below you can see how it works.