ESPHome Garage Door Sensor / Opener by LCSteve

Last crawled date: 3 years, 3 months ago

I needed a compact all-in-one unit to control my garage doors via ESPHome (Arduino) in Home Assistant and loved estancil's design so much I made the integration of it a basis to build my unit around. Like many projects this quickly developed scope creep and I had to stop where I was and deploy it at as to be able to test the functionality for some time. I already have a list of several improvements I was to make and will eventually get around to them.
So this was designed to work with a bunch of parts that I already had in my bins so to speak. The main items in this are with 1 of ea:
Wemos D1 Mini
HC-SR04 Ultrasonic Distance Sensor
SR501 Motion Sensor
WS2812B 5050 SMD LED
5V Active Buzzer
5V Relay Module Single Channel Opto-Isolated
Micro USB to DIP Board
Male & Female JST-XHP 2.54 Connector
So the first thing I'll say is this packaging is snug and was designed to keep the whole unit as compact as possible. I printed dozens of these iterations in ABS and tweaked tolerances by fractions of millimeters. I did this so that there is no single screw, nut or bolt holding anything together. Because of that though depending on the brand of part you use or the tolerances of your printer you might need to lightly file or sand some things. You can though print it in PLA and I have done so but the parts don't fit as snug in the mounts and pins and may need a dap of glue to secure them.
This whole unit is designed to be mounted with double sided tape to the front of the garage door opener so that the distance sensor lines up with the top of the garage door when it's opened. The door is too far away when closed for the sensor to pick anything up and the code for ESPHome is such that you can fine tune the distance where the door is considered opened. There is a multi-color led and buzzer to alert anyone near when the door is being controlled by Home Assistant (as per local building code). I've also included a motion sensor just because you can't have enough of them around the house and plans are to integrate motion detection into the decision tree for opening the door. I've had this installed on my doors for a couple weeks now and they have been working perfectly.
Upgrade plans:
Move the distance sensor to the bottom and use it instead for detecting if a car is in the bay.
Change the door opening detection to a top mounted hall or reed switch.
Make room for a larger buzzer or speaker for louder announcements if needed.
Reposition the LED so it's more visible (on one side the LED is harder to see due to the motion sensor cover).
Integrate temp/humidity & maybe CO sensors.
Eliminate the micro USB board for power and provide the option to use the Wemos for power or my original plan was to use a 12V step down to 5V to power the unit since my garage doors have 12V battery backup already on them.