Overengineer your garage door with your Raspberry Pi!

Update Feb 2016! New support for IFTTT Maker Channel

I just released a project I’ve been playing with for a while. With it, you can use a Raspberry Pi to open or close your garage door and to sense whether it’s currently open. You can do this from the comfort of your couch or anywhere in the world (with an appropriate VPN connection). Your spouse may think you’re crazy, but it’s so cool!

I started with this guide by Chris Driscoll at Driscosity. Chris has an awesome guide with step-by-step instructions, pictures, and even a video of the system in operation. (I use this same setup for GaragePi.)

What he has is great for a simple opener and status display, but the second time I used it my relay got stuck closed because of a connection issue (it’s javascript based). I also wanted more features and more control over what was going on.

So I wrote a Flask app (Python) with some JSON/jQuery for keeping the status updated. I also used Bootstrap for the front end.

Installation

The whole project with installation instructions are on GitHub.

GaragePi on GitHub

Screenshots

Here are some screenshots of it in action.

Here is a sequence of finding the door open, confirming the close, and then the final state after closing.

This is a sample of the history logs in portrait and landscape.