Jeff, you stopped short. That same pico can not only alert you of the open/close status but can also be used to open/close your door remotely. You’ll just need some of that two-conductor wire to go from the pico to the terminals on your opener where your current door opener switch connects. From there it’s just a little more yaml and you’re done.
True, but then I have to trust my own ability to not code something dumb like accidentally having the garage door open every time I drink a soda or something... or having it close on Red Shirt Jeff's head every time he walks under it!
@@JeffGeerling Your electric garage door opener has a sensor at the bottom that stops and reverses the door if it detects an obstacle in the doorway as the door closes. The safety sensor overrides any "close the door" commands.
With the new Bluetooth Proxy I think the ESP32 will be king of the hill for some time to come. I've replaced some ESP12F (8266) with ESP32-C3-12F (can be drop-in replacement, depends on what pins the device use) to give me Bluetooth Proxy in existing smart sockets. Edit: Seems Pico W has Bluetooth LE hardware, maybe once SDK support is in place ESPHome can leverage it for Bluetooth proxy as well. That'd be interesting!
They totally have production for these things … It's the big boy Pi they can't seem to make enough of, probably still because scalpers. The way Pi 4 prices have been going, I sort of have to wonder if we can run Raspberry Pi projects on Nvidia GPUs left over from mining? 🤪🤪🤪
There is a 100pcs reel of RP2040 I got for $0.93/piece from Ali sitting in the post office, waiting to be verified. Judging by reviews and the price from LCSC, where it probably came from, it's legit and the total BOM cost for my custom RP2040 dev board would be $2 with USB-C and 32Mbit flash. So, I'd say their production is in a pretty competitive state in MCU department..
Great video Jeff. I actually did something similar years ago with an arduino and a distance sensor that I mounted on the ceiling of my garage pointed at the floor. This has the advantage of not only being able to tell you if the door is up or down based on the distance, you can also determine if a car is parked in the stall assuming the door is down.
I like the modern simplicity. I did something like this about 12+ years ago with a hardwired connection and a much less powerful microcontroller. I pre-computed sunset/sunrise times for my latitude and longitude for each day of the year and triggered the alert/warn/chime only when the garage door is open 30 minutes past sunset....since the kids and wife were leaving the garage door open.
I did the garage door opener project 2 years ago. It was a fun project with the kid, but I did it with a rpi0 and lots of code since the original project was so insecure. :)
I currently rent so I can't do much modification to my home. I dreamt of being an electronics engineer but that never materialized. I may finally get into the maker scene due to a job change and the standard of living improvement that new job brings. I have been watching 3D printer videos but these videos by Jeff are SOOO inspiring. I plan to have a massive ESPHome network that covers everything from security to reminding me to take out the trash and walk the dog (I have no dog....yet!). Thanks Jeff for another great video! I wish you success on your journey to remission and good health.
Great Video, I like different ways to do the same thing. I did mine like some of the other commenters here did. I bought a cheap aqara zigbee door sensor and added it to home assistant. No coding at all needed and setup is just adding the sensor to the door and the rail. Works perfect every time to and is fast and local no cloud at all.
I've had a handful of IoT devices fail when WPA2/WPA3 PSK are offered on the same SSID, then others when very low speed rates were automatically disabled by the network controller. Since most of the IoT devices on 2.4 don't need to have high speed, leaving it at the old 802.11b/g/n settings seems fine and everything needing speed should just have 5ghz wireless.
So happy to hear the "Here in my garage". It was playing in my head from when I saw the thumbnail to when I opened the video and you meeting that expectation was some good dopamine
I had my first foray into ESPHome and Home Assistant this week! And a similar day or so of debugging 2.4GHz wifi networks. Found some smart plugs that don't phone home and were built for ESPHome + Home Assistant which is exactly the kind of setup I wanted.
7:48 Holy moly I designed that Pico wall mount thing! Even if you didn’t end up using it, what a place to see one of my designs appearing for the first time!
Haha thanks for making it! I was about to run with it when I noticed the breakout with the screw terminals... and I decided I would be lazy and not solder the wires in the garage :D
Since I didn't get attributed (and didn't ask in my previous comment and my case didn't get used, to be fair) - if anyone wants to find the model for themselves, search on Printables for "274753" (the item ID) (I'm assuming I can't link things!).
The biggest reason to use the Pico instead of an ESP is, IMHO, the fact that with a Pico, you're getting a working board every time. Every. Time. Now try to find a Wemos D1 mini that has a decent 3V3 regulator. Or literally any reasonably priced ESP device with an OK regulator. It's hard. So many of my ESPHome nodes keep rebooting or dying after a couple months because the regulators can't keep up. The only ones that are still running fine are the ones I power directly from the 3V3 rail or the ones with an LM1117 regulator.
Nice work and thanks for explaining why you chose the picow over esp32. One ide on home assistant is to also use the automation to alert you when the garage door is open when no one is home.
This is a great project for getting to know the workings of ESP Home and RPi Pico. Simple and way less expensive version of the same thing is a wireless window/door sensor with ZigBee or Z-Wave. No coding, no flashing, no soldering, nothing. Stick, add to home assistant, add to dashboard. Done.
One more thing you can do with this is have it close or open the door for you. If you have an older garage door with wired buttons on the wall you can tap the wires and have it run to a relay. The button on the wall is nothing but a momentary switch (normally open), so wire the relay to normally open and have the pico trip the relay and close the loop for the switch for like 500ms and you now have a automated garage door opener. I have down a number of houses with the old HAI boards to close an open garage door after x amount of time. Makes life simple, plus you can close it from any panel or phone so no running to the garage to close it.
4:42 actually for IoT, regardless if its cloud-based or selfhosted, consider separate ESSID at least (ideally would be separate AP along with ESSID) and dedicated VLAN, accessible from your trusted LAN, but not the other way around. I do have my work computer in such "dmz" as i treat it as potential threat (who knows if IT department of my company isn't running some sniffing). When i connect smart bulb i see traffic moving in and out this separate vlan (third octet is different) and easily sniff cloud communication in order to make it more local. Aside of paranoic - usually smart devices doesn't require tons of bandwidth and generally are more happy with legacy G/N networks on pure 2.4GHz.
These are pretty awesome boards. I'm using them in a project with my friend. These Pico boards are replacing our pi3 and pi4 boards in our remote controls allowing us to build them cheaper and smaller.
Glad to know I'm not the only one who gets reminded they left the garage door up :). Was thinking of doing this with code, but Home Assistant seems like a better option. Cheers!
I just was finally able to order a pico w. Very interesting project. I don't have it yet, should be a few days more. I'll look forward to trying this when I get it. Thanks
Very selfishly I look forward to your future videos regarding micros and Home Assistant. I have been building esp8266 and esp32 based sensors, switches, and controllers with HA for the past few years and very interested to see what new ideas you can share. Also been meaning to add a touch panel interface so the rpi idea you have is also right up my alley. Thanks!
Dude. Every video you put up is inspirational. I don't own a home, have the space or resources to achieve this. But, when I do, your vids will certainly be a guide. Glad to see you're doing well by the way. More vids please 😀
Glad to see you're doing so much better. I just jumped into HA too. Looking for a way to use Pico for an air pressure monitor for my air compressor. This helps get the ball rolling for me.
Nice idea! I've been working on some other environmental monitors, but hadn't even thought about things like air compressor monitoring. Though my current model is an old harbor freight that keeps going despite my best efforts to kill the thing!
Jeff, great video! Thanks for reminding me about the Pico W's abilities. I've been programming/building everything with ESP in the last few years and bought some of these PicoW but they are "just laying around." I'll give them a shot! My biggest project is a build of a (cheap) temp/humidity/light/motion/water sensor which I can place around the house in various zones. WiFi of course, and running from rechargeable Li Ions. I can recharge them using a "portable battery bank" with a 5v USB. Yeah I know--walk around to every one of them in the house and charge them up every nine months. But I need exercise. :) Keep up these great videos!
I built a system like this this a couple years ago using an esp with nodemcu, and a nanopi m3 running mosquito and NodeRED. It's been by far my most useful IOT project ever. I use it basically every day
I absolutely love the Pico! While I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for programming the PIC in Assembler, I'm learning MicroPython to be able to knock out embedded projects more quickly, and ESPHome is now on my radar.
Now you just need to get an option into home assistant to shut the garage door without having to walk to it to close it, possibly also motion detection to see if there is anything in the way of it closing properly or checking for movement near the door before it attempts to close.
Cool to see that ESPHome supports RPi Picos. I´m living in a department, so it is limited what I can automate. It is nice to see all the automation projects waiting for me, when I buy a house. I´m still waiting for the RPi Pico WH to get available. I always buy micro controllers with pre-soldered headers, because of poor ventilation options in my apartment.
Great video again! Good to know ESP home supports the pico now as it is really good to have more options. Look forward to the Pi display and LED matrix video(s). Thanks for making these kinds of videos!
An alternative to spending nearly $30 on a sensor, which is probably just a reed switch in a fancy aluminum casing... you could just use a magnet, reed switch, and a couple of L-brackets (which should only be a couple of bucks total). You could get fancy and 3D print a case or etc for it... if you were feeling fancy.
Another option (the one I use) is to use a Sonoff Mini, mechanically detaching the relay from AC voltage. That way you can use the terminals that would be normally conected to the switch to the magnetic sensor and use the relay to open/close the garage door. And it is powered by 120/220 directly. Then use tasmota to "software-detach" the sensor to the relay and done.
@@Darkk6969 It's hard to go wrong with a pack of 3 Sonoff relays for $20 on Amazon. Great support too. Even voice control with Alexa. Amazing times we live in!
I love homebrew solutions like these, but I got a MyQ essentially for free. Amazon gave a rebate if you bought a MyQ and used it with Amazon Key. I did one delivery with Amazon Key and then disabled that service. The MyQ has the sensor, controller, etc. all included. And, you can open and close the door from the app and you can tie it to other home automation devices.
Pretty cool. I wanted to be able to open/close my garage door and see if it's open/shut. I was looking into a Pi Pico, but I was having trouble finding out if was going to open the door if the power failed and came back on. I couldn't get my hands on one anyway, so I ended up using a Shelly 1. Not as big a learning opportunity, but it works great.
Did this with an Arduino many years ago, before I knew about Home Assistant (~2015). Arduino was connected to the door button, and I put a magnetic switch mounted to the door rail just like you have there. Had a webserver in my homelab running a single page site with some JS/ajax to request data/send commands to the arduino using PHP. Put it behind a reverse proxy for auth and security and made an Android webview app. Used that until about 2 years ago until I bought a new opener with MyQ. Thing ran for years without an issue, but it's nice not having to worry about maintaining it anymore.
I really like Google Hubs and casting Dashboards to them, if you dont need the 10" display its a cheap and easy option. Home Assistant guys are doing the lords work:D
I was a loyal ASUS guy until recently. I had the 88's and went through a number of them. I had so many problems over the years with devices and figured that the number of IoT devices I had was the reason for that. When my ASUS nodes failed for the third time in 2 year, I decided I needed to get a fix in way faster than I could get a hold of an ASUS. I bought the TP-Link DECO Mesh system and it's been a night and day difference. At first I missed some of the built in features ASUS had, but then I remembered I have plenty of Raspberry Pi's that can handle those things for me.
I was considering doing something like this hour. Garage door place it with one that has a built-in and I also installed a surveillance camera as well. It's still pretty slick though on how you got everything working.
I do that with a cheap ESP8266. Garage door control, monitoring. And also measure the temperature inside and outside the garage. I used to have an Arduino script, then switched to Tasmota. The transmission to the ESP to display is easy to do via HTTP get. This then switches the green lamp to blue.
Honestly it was already pretty easy with the esp32 and 8266, the only real difficulty was that the 32 is real picky about which of its IO you’re actually allowed to use
Hi Jeff! Please note that mounting reed switch on the metal, will result in false/positive sensor readings after a while, when the magnet will magnetize the gate frame.
I did something similar but I built a PCB with a small mosfet that triggers a relay and is connected to the garage door controller that also opens and closes the door from Home Assistant.
The troublemaker in me would hook up a camera or some other sensor that would trigger the door to close on someone as they walk out ;). But seriously, I can see myself peppering these Picos throughout my house to do various things related to this. Great video!
Great video Jeff! glad you see/hear that you're back on your feet and back with a great project. looking forward to the 'dashboard' display, something I've wanted to do for my home for YEARS! PS: MicroCenter is also my go-to place for electronics DIYs, RIP Radio Shack ...
I wish we had MicroCenter here in the UK. We have nothing that replaces Radio Shack (known as Tandy over here for some reason). RIP indeed. Briefly we had Maplin, but then they moved inexorably over to selling consumer crap and not components.
Oh, I see what you are doing. When I clicked I thought you built a transmitter to brute force open garage doors, lol. Pretty easy on really old doors, but I haven't seen it done with newer doors.
Just installed a simular setup using an relay, and old esp8266 i had lying around. But i flashed it with opengarage. Supports OpenHAB / Home Assistant and mqtt. Also it has some Nice features to Detect a parked CAR. Recomended
I have Home Assistant turn couple of smart bulbs blue when the garage door is open and Alexa also announces it. I also have temperature/humidity and motion sensors on the same board.
May be a little late for it now, but most garage door sensors are wired in the wall with CAT5e cables. Not really sure why, but that seems to be a norm. This means you're going to have an extra 4-6 conductors going up to your opener. The opener is very likely going to have an extra outlet next to it. It would also allow you to add a relay controlled through the pico to allow you to open and close the door as well. Maybe something to keep in mind for a potential 2.0 version!
I don't think that Cat5e would work on a Liftmaster door because I recently ran across a video where a professional door technician claimed that even the Liftmaster brand 18/2 wire is unreliable and that he often upgrades it to 16 gauge bell wire. I hate that I had to learn all of this just to fix my own door because nobody was available during the pandemic
@@TqSNv9R0iG5Ckxew That's strange. The current is just a few milliamps so the wire size shouldn't matter unless you have super long runs. My house has the openers connected with 4-wire phone cable (it's a bit too old for Cat5 but it's still 24awg solid copper) and it has been fine. It's a Sears/Craftsman unit but it's the exact same hardware as Chamberlain/Liftmaster. The latest generation uses the wires a bit differently (I _think_ the wall controller only uses the wire for power and uses wireless for comms but I'm not sure) but I think it would still work fine.
@@eDoc2020 It's hard to say. I can't confirm but I suspect that it's a voltage drop issue caused by a combination of long runs, small wire, and bad connections. It seems common for garage door installers to use wire nuts for fast connections but I just don't trust them in an environment like that. I'm not certain, but I believe that the new generation of photo eye sensors act as both sensors and transmitters, therefore requiring more power (A big assumption).
I like that you started with a practical problem instead of getting the tech just to have it. Don't get me wrong, I own lots of tech hardware and tools I have no use for yet because I like the tech and I'm pretty sure I will use them in the future. However, it's always good to be able to tell your significant other that you are spending time and money to solve a real world problem that they identified. It earns relationship points ;-)
I can see this being very useful, one Pico W could probably cover the whole laundry room in my house. Including back door ajar/unlocked, and porch light. I would love to know when laundry didn't get moved to the dryer, or the lid got left up and the load didn't go. Or I forgot to start the dryer. Thanks JG
So would I, about how clean your laundry is, and whether you leave the seat up. It would influence your social credit score. RESIST this intrusioin on your 4th Amendment Rights.
Ha, one of the dozens of little screwdrivers that come with a kit (in this case, that breakout board)... I have a little baggie full of those things, in all colors!
Great video Jeff! I used door hinge on the garage door and one side (glued) i put my circuit inside 3d printed case with reed switch and other side of hinge placed strong magnet. So when door open halfway thru magnet side hinge falls down in 90 degrees thus breaks the contact with reed switch which closes my circuit and sends mqtt message as door open and shuts down roght after, No way of telling if its closed but you can still use notification system to remind
Depending on your production timeline, we might have been doing this at the exact same time. I used an ESP8266 with Tasmota with a ruggedized reed switch I needed to 3D print a mount for. Also connected a NO relay connected to wire put in the same ports as the wall button wire and included an automation to turn off the associated switch after 1 second, simulating a button press. Only problem so far is the double-sided tape I used for the reed switch is dicey...
Heh, the double-sided tape wouldn't last more than a season here! Gotta get some screws in the wall for anything not in a conditioned space in St. Louis.
That wifi bolt-on - has ARM cores inside, believe it may be more powerful ARM cores as well. Oh, and it can do Bluetooth, though that is not enabled - but can bet it will be a nice surprise sometime ahead.
Awesome video! I really would like to see you create a Raspberry Pi Home Assistant Touch Dashboard! I currently have lots of devices in my home with home assistant and would like to see what you come up with on a center home dashboard for home assistant! :D
Next step, replace that setup with a Shelly 1. TheHookUp had a video a while back where he added a Shelly 1 that both monitored whether his garage door was open and also shut it. You could set up a node red integration with a motion sensor in the garage and tell it to shut the garage if it does not see movement for X minutes
I'm going to try and do something like this soon, prob on an esp32, because I'm more familiar with the esp32. I ran some cat5e wire to the door and esp32 location, but instead of a heavy duty sensor, I'll try and just stick a magnet to door and use a hall sensor. It won't be fancy or heavy duty.
Interesting project, I like it. You should add a camera and the ability to close the garage door with the home assistant app. I may look into this as the garage door seems to frequently be left open. Personally I don't care for the Raspberry Pi Pico. I could never get it to do what wanted it to do because usually the library I needed did not work or did not exist. I gave up on it some time ago and switched back to the ESP32 ESP-WROOM-32 or the ESP32-CAM-MB boards.
0:01 I just bought this Raspberry Pi Pico and replaced all of the computer circuitry in my car and turned it into the world's very first open source car! Until next time, I'm Jeff Geerling.
If anyone could do it, Jeff could. Since I am currently looking at a painful amount of money to replace a certain module in my car I would say "Do it Jeff"! Heck, if you get together with some of the other tech and car RUclipsrs it would make a great collab project! You could open source the code and sell pre-made hardware for those that don't want to solder. Imagine how much revenue that could generate for you and the others in the collab. There is an endless supply of cars needing computer modules out there, all to do different things in different ways. Imagine an entire army of open source programmers reverse engineering those stupid proprietary modules and using an open source platform to make them even better. The auto industry would hate us ;-). If you or someone else takes this project and runs with it, just remember who gave you the idea. Marco - The GPUtuber and cggnow ;-)
Great Video. Does HomeAssistant look for updates for the software/firmware of the devices you add? I think that would be beneficial with an array of potentially piecemeal devices. I think ESPhome had a non critical vulnerability last year. And probably a good idea to have your wifi devices on a guest or limited wifi network.
You could use another pin out to wire into your push button to Close the door so you will have full control over it. Just rely on the IR sensors under the door to stop if your kids outside or something... Or maybe you can also make another pinout to put a motion/IR human detector on the board and if door open, the sensor detects no objects moving, no human/animal IR heat, then when you click close, it closes the door. I think this could be a fun project you put together for a video some day? adding the HA interface buttons and stuff would be stupid easy. but I have a Chamberlin MyQ and someone in HA community was able to make a hook for HA to control MyQ doors via the app, show status, and open and shut the door from the app. Which is nice, because Chamerblin took out all their API for customers to utilize, but this method works amazing and immediate updates when the door opens and when i trigger to open/close from the app.
This video came out at the perfect time since I just got a house yesterday. How well do you think the pico will handle the temps in the garage during the more extreme times of Winter/Summer?
Hey, Jeff! I enjoyed this video. I do have a question, though. Do you plan to use the Pico W and Home Assistant to control the actual opening and closing of the door, not just notify you that the door is open or closed?
Good question-and currently, no. I may end up putting a couple more sensors on that Pico in the garage, though. I've considered simplifying my irrigation system since I don't water the grass... might just have one zone controlled through the same wiring tied into the Pico for drip irrigation for a few plants in the front!
Man I respect the N-O-D-E Pinouts shirt. It's a shame their channel is inactive now, but maybe they'll return again someday. Nice video though Jeff, been waiting to do this with some ESP-01 boards
Cool setup, but I think it can be done a lot easyer. I simply used some aqara door sensors (zigbee) and mounted them on the steel rails in the roof where the doors move. However I did use a raspberry pi with a relay switch for opening and closing the door throught the garage door motor. Thanks for your content! :)
Now to hack the garage door button itself to close the garage door remotely or have it automatically close through home assistant after some time. if you decide to go with the latter you may even be able to set up a delay when it pushes a notification incase you're cleaning out the garage for the next few hours or so for example. though im not certain that last bit is possible as i dont have much experience with home assistant. im just spitballing ideas here
I love this solution! last summer I built a blynk app on a pi zero W with some switches and relays to do this plus open and close the doors, but I'm going to try this out, seems like it could be even more reliable. Also, Jeff, I'm an embedded software engineer in MO, Let me know if you ever need some help with Linux driver/ Micro controller work.
DUUUUDEEE. Putting the pins in the breadboard to be able to solder them on the Pico is such a brilliant move... I fucked up a couple of times trying with helping hands and clamps.... Never thought of the breadboard...
Haha, I know right? The first time I had seen that trick my mind was blown. For many years I would rig up these elaborate helping hands setups and inevitably it wouldn't be perfectly flush. Breadboards are quite handy!
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Jeff, you stopped short. That same pico can not only alert you of the open/close status but can also be used to open/close your door remotely. You’ll just need some of that two-conductor wire to go from the pico to the terminals on your opener where your current door opener switch connects. From there it’s just a little more yaml and you’re done.
True, but then I have to trust my own ability to not code something dumb like accidentally having the garage door open every time I drink a soda or something... or having it close on Red Shirt Jeff's head every time he walks under it!
@@JeffGeerling or code it to trap RSJ in the garage so you know its safe to unbox something.
new to this stuff, but I was hoping that was the case.
@@JeffGeerling that's why closing can be automatic but opening is always user initiated 😅
@@JeffGeerling Your electric garage door opener has a sensor at the bottom that stops and reverses the door if it detects an obstacle in the doorway as the door closes. The safety sensor overrides any "close the door" commands.
Neat to see Pico W entering space that ESP32/ESP8266 dominate. Pi foundation need to ramp up production!
With the new Bluetooth Proxy I think the ESP32 will be king of the hill for some time to come. I've replaced some ESP12F (8266) with ESP32-C3-12F (can be drop-in replacement, depends on what pins the device use) to give me Bluetooth Proxy in existing smart sockets.
Edit: Seems Pico W has Bluetooth LE hardware, maybe once SDK support is in place ESPHome can leverage it for Bluetooth proxy as well. That'd be interesting!
They totally have production for these things … It's the big boy Pi they can't seem to make enough of, probably still because scalpers. The way Pi 4 prices have been going, I sort of have to wonder if we can run Raspberry Pi projects on Nvidia GPUs left over from mining? 🤪🤪🤪
Pico's are about the only thing you can buy right now.
rp2040 lacks the built in firmware security which makes it pretty limited for commercial use other than some basic application.
There is a 100pcs reel of RP2040 I got for $0.93/piece from Ali sitting in the post office, waiting to be verified.
Judging by reviews and the price from LCSC, where it probably came from, it's legit
and the total BOM cost for my custom RP2040 dev board would be $2 with USB-C and 32Mbit flash.
So, I'd say their production is in a pretty competitive state in MCU department..
I genuinely can’t express how much your videos have helped me not quit going to school for a career in computers, thank you!
Great video Jeff. I actually did something similar years ago with an arduino and a distance sensor that I mounted on the ceiling of my garage pointed at the floor. This has the advantage of not only being able to tell you if the door is up or down based on the distance, you can also determine if a car is parked in the stall assuming the door is down.
That's such a clever solution!
I like the modern simplicity. I did something like this about 12+ years ago with a hardwired connection and a much less powerful microcontroller. I pre-computed sunset/sunrise times for my latitude and longitude for each day of the year and triggered the alert/warn/chime only when the garage door is open 30 minutes past sunset....since the kids and wife were leaving the garage door open.
I did the garage door opener project 2 years ago. It was a fun project with the kid, but I did it with a rpi0 and lots of code since the original project was so insecure. :)
I currently rent so I can't do much modification to my home. I dreamt of being an electronics engineer but that never materialized. I may finally get into the maker scene due to a job change and the standard of living improvement that new job brings. I have been watching 3D printer videos but these videos by Jeff are SOOO inspiring. I plan to have a massive ESPHome network that covers everything from security to reminding me to take out the trash and walk the dog (I have no dog....yet!). Thanks Jeff for another great video! I wish you success on your journey to remission and good health.
My grandfather sometimes forgets to close the garage door. 🤣
I was totally gonna do this. Beat me to it! Nice!
Great Video, I like different ways to do the same thing. I did mine like some of the other commenters here did. I bought a cheap aqara zigbee door sensor and added it to home assistant. No coding at all needed and setup is just adding the sensor to the door and the rail. Works perfect every time to and is fast and local no cloud at all.
I've had a handful of IoT devices fail when WPA2/WPA3 PSK are offered on the same SSID, then others when very low speed rates were automatically disabled by the network controller. Since most of the IoT devices on 2.4 don't need to have high speed, leaving it at the old 802.11b/g/n settings seems fine and everything needing speed should just have 5ghz wireless.
So happy to hear the "Here in my garage". It was playing in my head from when I saw the thumbnail to when I opened the video and you meeting that expectation was some good dopamine
I had my first foray into ESPHome and Home Assistant this week! And a similar day or so of debugging 2.4GHz wifi networks. Found some smart plugs that don't phone home and were built for ESPHome + Home Assistant which is exactly the kind of setup I wanted.
Cool the guys from Nabu Casa are making these work as well! Thanks for sharing an persevering in the solving of the initial blinking issue!
7:48 Holy moly I designed that Pico wall mount thing! Even if you didn’t end up using it, what a place to see one of my designs appearing for the first time!
Haha thanks for making it! I was about to run with it when I noticed the breakout with the screw terminals... and I decided I would be lazy and not solder the wires in the garage :D
Since I didn't get attributed (and didn't ask in my previous comment and my case didn't get used, to be fair) - if anyone wants to find the model for themselves, search on Printables for "274753" (the item ID) (I'm assuming I can't link things!).
The biggest reason to use the Pico instead of an ESP is, IMHO, the fact that with a Pico, you're getting a working board every time. Every. Time. Now try to find a Wemos D1 mini that has a decent 3V3 regulator. Or literally any reasonably priced ESP device with an OK regulator. It's hard. So many of my ESPHome nodes keep rebooting or dying after a couple months because the regulators can't keep up. The only ones that are still running fine are the ones I power directly from the 3V3 rail or the ones with an LM1117 regulator.
Nice work and thanks for explaining why you chose the picow over esp32. One ide on home assistant is to also use the automation to alert you when the garage door is open when no one is home.
What a throw back intro Jeff! Love it :)
You are spot on with the standardization options with Pico, compared to at least 5 different esp32 board layouts I got.
This is a great project for getting to know the workings of ESP Home and RPi Pico. Simple and way less expensive version of the same thing is a wireless window/door sensor with ZigBee or Z-Wave. No coding, no flashing, no soldering, nothing. Stick, add to home assistant, add to dashboard. Done.
One more thing you can do with this is have it close or open the door for you. If you have an older garage door with wired buttons on the wall you can tap the wires and have it run to a relay. The button on the wall is nothing but a momentary switch (normally open), so wire the relay to normally open and have the pico trip the relay and close the loop for the switch for like 500ms and you now have a automated garage door opener. I have down a number of houses with the old HAI boards to close an open garage door after x amount of time. Makes life simple, plus you can close it from any panel or phone so no running to the garage to close it.
4:42 actually for IoT, regardless if its cloud-based or selfhosted, consider separate ESSID at least (ideally would be separate AP along with ESSID) and dedicated VLAN, accessible from your trusted LAN, but not the other way around.
I do have my work computer in such "dmz" as i treat it as potential threat (who knows if IT department of my company isn't running some sniffing).
When i connect smart bulb i see traffic moving in and out this separate vlan (third octet is different) and easily sniff cloud communication in order to make it more local.
Aside of paranoic - usually smart devices doesn't require tons of bandwidth and generally are more happy with legacy G/N networks on pure 2.4GHz.
These are pretty awesome boards. I'm using them in a project with my friend. These Pico boards are replacing our pi3 and pi4 boards in our remote controls allowing us to build them cheaper and smaller.
Nice. I'm also currently building a display for weather and latest phone calls with the pico.
Glad to know I'm not the only one who gets reminded they left the garage door up :). Was thinking of doing this with code, but Home Assistant seems like a better option. Cheers!
You never cease to amaze. That's awesome work and your explanation is easy to understand. Thank you!
I just was finally able to order a pico w. Very interesting project. I don't have it yet, should be a few days more. I'll look forward to trying this when I get it. Thanks
nice video, Im using ESPhome for a year now, really happy with it, ESP32's are stable and fast, good to know the Pico is In the mix too
Very selfishly I look forward to your future videos regarding micros and Home Assistant. I have been building esp8266 and esp32 based sensors, switches, and controllers with HA for the past few years and very interested to see what new ideas you can share.
Also been meaning to add a touch panel interface so the rpi idea you have is also right up my alley.
Thanks!
The touch panel may need to wait for the new year though :(
But it should be a fun video!
@@JeffGeerling No worries and no rush. I'll still be here, god willing. 🙂
Hope you and your are doing well! Enjoy the holidays.
Dude. Every video you put up is inspirational. I don't own a home, have the space or resources to achieve this. But, when I do, your vids will certainly be a guide.
Glad to see you're doing well by the way.
More vids please 😀
Glad to see you're doing so much better. I just jumped into HA too. Looking for a way to use Pico for an air pressure monitor for my air compressor. This helps get the ball rolling for me.
Nice idea! I've been working on some other environmental monitors, but hadn't even thought about things like air compressor monitoring. Though my current model is an old harbor freight that keeps going despite my best efforts to kill the thing!
@@JeffGeerling The harder you try, the more they fight back. Until the day you really need them, then they die. Tools are spiteful like that.
Jeff, great video! Thanks for reminding me about the Pico W's abilities. I've been programming/building everything with ESP in the last few years and bought some of these PicoW but they are "just laying around." I'll give them a shot!
My biggest project is a build of a (cheap) temp/humidity/light/motion/water sensor which I can place around the house in various zones. WiFi of course, and running from rechargeable Li Ions. I can recharge them using a "portable battery bank" with a 5v USB. Yeah I know--walk around to every one of them in the house and charge them up every nine months. But I need exercise. :)
Keep up these great videos!
"What are you doing with that USB battery bank?"
Exercising! 🤷♂️ :D
I built a system like this this a couple years ago using an esp with nodemcu, and a nanopi m3 running mosquito and NodeRED. It's been by far my most useful IOT project ever. I use it basically every day
So far haven't tested out NodeRED but I should.
I absolutely love the Pico! While I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for programming the PIC in Assembler, I'm learning MicroPython to be able to knock out embedded projects more quickly, and ESPHome is now on my radar.
Yeah besides the overhead/memory use, MicroPython is great for quickly hacking something together.
Now you just need to get an option into home assistant to shut the garage door without having to walk to it to close it, possibly also motion detection to see if there is anything in the way of it closing properly or checking for movement near the door before it attempts to close.
Cool to see that ESPHome supports RPi Picos. I´m living in a department, so it is limited what I can automate. It is nice to see all the automation projects waiting for me, when I buy a house. I´m still waiting for the RPi Pico WH to get available. I always buy micro controllers with pre-soldered headers, because of poor ventilation options in my apartment.
Great video again! Good to know ESP home supports the pico now as it is really good to have more options. Look forward to the Pi display and LED matrix video(s). Thanks for making these kinds of videos!
An alternative to spending nearly $30 on a sensor, which is probably just a reed switch in a fancy aluminum casing... you could just use a magnet, reed switch, and a couple of L-brackets (which should only be a couple of bucks total). You could get fancy and 3D print a case or etc for it... if you were feeling fancy.
Another option (the one I use) is to use a Sonoff Mini, mechanically detaching the relay from AC voltage. That way you can use the terminals that would be normally conected to the switch to the magnetic sensor and use the relay to open/close the garage door. And it is powered by 120/220 directly. Then use tasmota to "software-detach" the sensor to the relay and done.
I love their Sonoff switches. So easy to flash them with tasmota firmware.
@@Darkk6969
It's hard to go wrong with a pack of 3 Sonoff relays for $20 on Amazon. Great support too. Even voice control with Alexa. Amazing times we live in!
Love it! Other than the obvious, "The garage is open, would you like me to close it?" functionality that I'm sure you'll add soon.
Thank you so much for this video and the detailed step-by-step tutorial. I had issues getting ESPhome to run on my Pico W, but now it just works! 🎆
Depending on what else you want to automate later, a sensor that indicates whether the car is in the garage could be interesting.
I love homebrew solutions like these, but I got a MyQ essentially for free. Amazon gave a rebate if you bought a MyQ and used it with Amazon Key. I did one delivery with Amazon Key and then disabled that service. The MyQ has the sensor, controller, etc. all included. And, you can open and close the door from the app and you can tie it to other home automation devices.
What a throwback with that intro.
Pretty cool. I wanted to be able to open/close my garage door and see if it's open/shut. I was looking into a Pi Pico, but I was having trouble finding out if was going to open the door if the power failed and came back on. I couldn't get my hands on one anyway, so I ended up using a Shelly 1. Not as big a learning opportunity, but it works great.
Did this with an Arduino many years ago, before I knew about Home Assistant (~2015). Arduino was connected to the door button, and I put a magnetic switch mounted to the door rail just like you have there. Had a webserver in my homelab running a single page site with some JS/ajax to request data/send commands to the arduino using PHP. Put it behind a reverse proxy for auth and security and made an Android webview app. Used that until about 2 years ago until I bought a new opener with MyQ. Thing ran for years without an issue, but it's nice not having to worry about maintaining it anymore.
I really like Google Hubs and casting Dashboards to them, if you dont need the 10" display its a cheap and easy option. Home Assistant guys are doing the lords work:D
Great video of the Pico with esp home, now we just need Bluetooth support to complete the package
0:40 Your musical tastes are immaculate. I didn't know you listened to all of the top 40 greatest hits!
I was a loyal ASUS guy until recently. I had the 88's and went through a number of them. I had so many problems over the years with devices and figured that the number of IoT devices I had was the reason for that. When my ASUS nodes failed for the third time in 2 year, I decided I needed to get a fix in way faster than I could get a hold of an ASUS. I bought the TP-Link DECO Mesh system and it's been a night and day difference. At first I missed some of the built in features ASUS had, but then I remembered I have plenty of Raspberry Pi's that can handle those things for me.
I was considering doing something like this hour. Garage door place it with one that has a built-in and I also installed a surveillance camera as well. It's still pretty slick though on how you got everything working.
I do that with a cheap ESP8266. Garage door control, monitoring. And also measure the temperature inside and outside the garage. I used to have an Arduino script, then switched to Tasmota.
The transmission to the ESP to display is easy to do via HTTP get. This then switches the green lamp to blue.
Which Arduino script did you use for that?
Honestly it was already pretty easy with the esp32 and 8266, the only real difficulty was that the 32 is real picky about which of its IO you’re actually allowed to use
Hi Jeff! Please note that mounting reed switch on the metal, will result in false/positive sensor readings after a while, when the magnet will magnetize the gate frame.
I did something similar but I built a PCB with a small mosfet that triggers a relay and is connected to the garage door controller that also opens and closes the door from Home Assistant.
The troublemaker in me would hook up a camera or some other sensor that would trigger the door to close on someone as they walk out ;). But seriously, I can see myself peppering these Picos throughout my house to do various things related to this. Great video!
Great video Jeff! glad you see/hear that you're back on your feet and back with a great project. looking forward to the 'dashboard' display, something I've wanted to do for my home for YEARS!
PS: MicroCenter is also my go-to place for electronics DIYs, RIP Radio Shack ...
Micro Center is close to the Radio Shack of my youth... though they don't have quite the selection of random A/V gear.
I wish we had MicroCenter here in the UK. We have nothing that replaces Radio Shack (known as Tandy over here for some reason). RIP indeed. Briefly we had Maplin, but then they moved inexorably over to selling consumer crap and not components.
@@cooperised Tandy Corporation was the parent corp of Radio Shack.
That looks amazing, mate, and I'm glad you're well enough to return to the workshop!
Oh, I see what you are doing. When I clicked I thought you built a transmitter to brute force open garage doors, lol. Pretty easy on really old doors, but I haven't seen it done with newer doors.
Ha! Maybe if I can get my hands on a Flipper Zero!
That is always my question and you answered it. Why use a pico?
Just installed a simular setup using an relay, and old esp8266 i had lying around. But i flashed it with opengarage. Supports OpenHAB / Home Assistant and mqtt. Also it has some Nice features to Detect a parked CAR. Recomended
Very cool, Jeff! Now I have something to do this winter.
I have Home Assistant turn couple of smart bulbs blue when the garage door is open and Alexa also announces it. I also have temperature/humidity and motion sensors on the same board.
This is neat. I hope I have a garage door one day so I can do this as well! Glad to see you back at home brother!
May be a little late for it now, but most garage door sensors are wired in the wall with CAT5e cables. Not really sure why, but that seems to be a norm. This means you're going to have an extra 4-6 conductors going up to your opener. The opener is very likely going to have an extra outlet next to it. It would also allow you to add a relay controlled through the pico to allow you to open and close the door as well. Maybe something to keep in mind for a potential 2.0 version!
I don't think that Cat5e would work on a Liftmaster door because I recently ran across a video where a professional door technician claimed that even the Liftmaster brand 18/2 wire is unreliable and that he often upgrades it to 16 gauge bell wire.
I hate that I had to learn all of this just to fix my own door because nobody was available during the pandemic
@@TqSNv9R0iG5Ckxew That's strange. The current is just a few milliamps so the wire size shouldn't matter unless you have super long runs. My house has the openers connected with 4-wire phone cable (it's a bit too old for Cat5 but it's still 24awg solid copper) and it has been fine. It's a Sears/Craftsman unit but it's the exact same hardware as Chamberlain/Liftmaster. The latest generation uses the wires a bit differently (I _think_ the wall controller only uses the wire for power and uses wireless for comms but I'm not sure) but I think it would still work fine.
@@eDoc2020
It's hard to say. I can't confirm but I suspect that it's a voltage drop issue caused by a combination of long runs, small wire, and bad connections. It seems common for garage door installers to use wire nuts for fast connections but I just don't trust them in an environment like that. I'm not certain, but I believe that the new generation of photo eye sensors act as both sensors and transmitters, therefore requiring more power (A big assumption).
I like that you started with a practical problem instead of getting the tech just to have it. Don't get me wrong, I own lots of tech hardware and tools I have no use for yet because I like the tech and I'm pretty sure I will use them in the future. However, it's always good to be able to tell your significant other that you are spending time and money to solve a real world problem that they identified. It earns relationship points ;-)
Exactly!
Awesome Jeff hopefully I can make a project work for my Remote Gate. Thank you always for your amazing videos 📹
I can see this being very useful, one Pico W could probably cover the whole laundry room in my house. Including back door ajar/unlocked, and porch light.
I would love to know when laundry didn't get moved to the dryer, or the lid got left up and the load didn't go. Or I forgot to start the dryer.
Thanks JG
So would I, about how clean your laundry is, and whether you leave the seat up. It would influence your social credit score.
RESIST this intrusioin on your 4th Amendment Rights.
Subbed just for the intro, I'm glad that even in 2022 that meme still isn't dead.
Go Tai! 😆
.. I'm guessing no one else got that hey Jeff...
09:02 That is probably the cutest screwdriver I've ever seen
Ha, one of the dozens of little screwdrivers that come with a kit (in this case, that breakout board)... I have a little baggie full of those things, in all colors!
Great video Jeff! I used door hinge on the garage door and one side (glued) i put my circuit inside 3d printed case with reed switch and other side of hinge placed strong magnet. So when door open halfway thru magnet side hinge falls down in 90 degrees thus breaks the contact with reed switch which closes my circuit and sends mqtt message as door open and shuts down roght after, No way of telling if its closed but you can still use notification system to remind
Ahhhh... Now we know why you were asking those questions on Twitter. :) Glad to hear you got it sorted out. 😁👍
Ha, exactly!
Depending on your production timeline, we might have been doing this at the exact same time. I used an ESP8266 with Tasmota with a ruggedized reed switch I needed to 3D print a mount for.
Also connected a NO relay connected to wire put in the same ports as the wall button wire and included an automation to turn off the associated switch after 1 second, simulating a button press. Only problem so far is the double-sided tape I used for the reed switch is dicey...
Heh, the double-sided tape wouldn't last more than a season here! Gotta get some screws in the wall for anything not in a conditioned space in St. Louis.
That wifi bolt-on - has ARM cores inside, believe it may be more powerful ARM cores as well. Oh, and it can do Bluetooth, though that is not enabled - but can bet it will be a nice surprise sometime ahead.
I'm hoping they get Bluetooth working at some point. It's such a waste having it there in hardware but not accessible yet!
Really looking forward to the dashboard build! Curious to see how the UI/UX will turn out thanks for the video
I'm glad other people work on silly problems for 2 days straight resulting in hair pulling -- I thought it was only me having issues like this
Awesome video! I really would like to see you create a Raspberry Pi Home Assistant Touch Dashboard! I currently have lots of devices in my home with home assistant and would like to see what you come up with on a center home dashboard for home assistant! :D
man I really enjoy your videos, and I'm happy to see you are better. Keep it up Jeff
Next step, replace that setup with a Shelly 1. TheHookUp had a video a while back where he added a Shelly 1 that both monitored whether his garage door was open and also shut it. You could set up a node red integration with a motion sensor in the garage and tell it to shut the garage if it does not see movement for X minutes
Great video as always, Jeff! Can you please do a setup for automatic watering for a garden with something like RapberryPi Pico?
I'm going to try and do something like this soon, prob on an esp32, because I'm more familiar with the esp32. I ran some cat5e wire to the door and esp32 location, but instead of a heavy duty sensor, I'll try and just stick a magnet to door and use a hall sensor. It won't be fancy or heavy duty.
Glad to see you're doing better.
Interesting project, I like it. You should add a camera and the ability to close the garage door with the home assistant app. I may look into this as the garage door seems to frequently be left open.
Personally I don't care for the Raspberry Pi Pico. I could never get it to do what wanted it to do because usually the library I needed did not work or did not exist. I gave up on it some time ago and switched back to the ESP32 ESP-WROOM-32 or the ESP32-CAM-MB boards.
0:01 I just bought this Raspberry Pi Pico and replaced all of the computer circuitry in my car and turned it into the world's very first open source car! Until next time, I'm Jeff Geerling.
If anyone could do it, Jeff could. Since I am currently looking at a painful amount of money to replace a certain module in my car I would say "Do it Jeff"! Heck, if you get together with some of the other tech and car RUclipsrs it would make a great collab project! You could open source the code and sell pre-made hardware for those that don't want to solder. Imagine how much revenue that could generate for you and the others in the collab. There is an endless supply of cars needing computer modules out there, all to do different things in different ways. Imagine an entire army of open source programmers reverse engineering those stupid proprietary modules and using an open source platform to make them even better. The auto industry would hate us ;-). If you or someone else takes this project and runs with it, just remember who gave you the idea. Marco - The GPUtuber and cggnow ;-)
Great Video. Does HomeAssistant look for updates for the software/firmware of the devices you add? I think that would be beneficial with an array of potentially piecemeal devices. I think ESPhome had a non critical vulnerability last year. And probably a good idea to have your wifi devices on a guest or limited wifi network.
You could use another pin out to wire into your push button to Close the door so you will have full control over it. Just rely on the IR sensors under the door to stop if your kids outside or something... Or maybe you can also make another pinout to put a motion/IR human detector on the board and if door open, the sensor detects no objects moving, no human/animal IR heat, then when you click close, it closes the door. I think this could be a fun project you put together for a video some day? adding the HA interface buttons and stuff would be stupid easy.
but I have a Chamberlin MyQ and someone in HA community was able to make a hook for HA to control MyQ doors via the app, show status, and open and shut the door from the app. Which is nice, because Chamerblin took out all their API for customers to utilize, but this method works amazing and immediate updates when the door opens and when i trigger to open/close from the app.
I did something like this with the Arduino based WeMos D1. It was a fun little project.
This video came out at the perfect time since I just got a house yesterday. How well do you think the pico will handle the temps in the garage during the more extreme times of Winter/Summer?
Hey, Jeff! I enjoyed this video. I do have a question, though. Do you plan to use the Pico W and Home Assistant to control the actual opening and closing of the door, not just notify you that the door is open or closed?
Good question-and currently, no. I may end up putting a couple more sensors on that Pico in the garage, though. I've considered simplifying my irrigation system since I don't water the grass... might just have one zone controlled through the same wiring tied into the Pico for drip irrigation for a few plants in the front!
jeff you are a freaking genius i wish someday i could be like you
Man I respect the N-O-D-E Pinouts shirt. It's a shame their channel is inactive now, but maybe they'll return again someday. Nice video though Jeff, been waiting to do this with some ESP-01 boards
Cool setup, but I think it can be done a lot easyer. I simply used some aqara door sensors (zigbee) and mounted them on the steel rails in the roof where the doors move. However I did use a raspberry pi with a relay switch for opening and closing the door throught the garage door motor.
Thanks for your content! :)
1st section title: Here in my garage...
Did I have heard that anywhere?
Solid start right there
Looks great. I've wanted to do a local garage door sensor project for a bit.
Great video Jeff :)
Now you need to add some solid-state switches to the Raspberry Pi Pico W so you can remotely open and close the doors yourself :D
Now to hack the garage door button itself to close the garage door remotely or have it automatically close through home assistant after some time. if you decide to go with the latter you may even be able to set up a delay when it pushes a notification incase you're cleaning out the garage for the next few hours or so for example. though im not certain that last bit is possible as i dont have much experience with home assistant. im just spitballing ideas here
Hey Jeff, you can just connect a WIFI or Zigbee relay to the doors motor and after 5 minutes it will close automatically.
I love this solution! last summer I built a blynk app on a pi zero W with some switches and relays to do this plus open and close the doors, but I'm going to try this out, seems like it could be even more reliable. Also, Jeff, I'm an embedded software engineer in MO, Let me know if you ever need some help with Linux driver/ Micro controller work.
Pure awesomeness Jeff, thank you🙏✌️
DUUUUDEEE. Putting the pins in the breadboard to be able to solder them on the Pico is such a brilliant move... I fucked up a couple of times trying with helping hands and clamps....
Never thought of the breadboard...
Haha, I know right? The first time I had seen that trick my mind was blown. For many years I would rig up these elaborate helping hands setups and inevitably it wouldn't be perfectly flush.
Breadboards are quite handy!