I include this when considering buying something integrated.
For example Philips Hue is overpriced, but their Home Assistant integration is top tier and ultra-reliable. Contrast that with myQ garage door openers (LiftMaster, Chamberlain and Craftsman) recently breaking Home Assistant support on purpose, to essentially replace it with nothing, and they're dead to me.
So Xiaomi adding support, assuming it is reliable, definitely moves them into a better category.
I installed a pair of these, and haven't looked back. Yes, there is a little bit of a curve with rewiring your opener, but there is great documentation available, and safety in the fact that if you mess up, your door just won't open. If you snap a picture ahead of time, it's easy to undo. And from there, you can hook it in to Home Assistant or HomeKit and do whatever you want, which is amazing. My Home Assistant notifies me when the door has been open for 5, 10, 30, 60 minutes, as well as if the sensor is obstructed for the same intervals.
Second this product. I wanted an Ethernet version so I made my own (it's integrated into esphome and the circuit is documented here https://github.com/Kaldek/rat-ratgdo). Apart from general usage, I use mine to tilt the garage door a small amount if it detects bad air quality in my shop (using an IKEA air quality sensor via home assistant).
I'm aware but I'm one of the like 5 people that bought the overpriced MyQ-HomeKit adapter and it's still working to provide HA control. If it ever dies I'll be going ratgdo or opengarage for sure
It's inexpensive if you discount the cost of your education learning how to wire in something like that.
There's an order of magnitude difference in project size between setting up the old MyQ integration with home assistant and learning how to use.. whatever that thing is.
Sometimes I think clever and educated people forget what it's like to be less intelligent or educated.
That's a fair point, but it's still likely less expensive than replacing your existing opener if you include the cost of an electrician doing the wiring for you.
It's really not hard at all. It probably took 5 minutes to install, with most of the time futzing with the power cable routing so that it looked decent and didn't rub on sharp corners of the opener bracket.
I agree that it's not challenging. I'm just saying that even if someone is intimidated by doing this, it's still probably a relatively inexpensive option even when you include hiring an electrician.
1. They want to charge for some integrations. I could see this if they didn't make local only impossible if you want anything beyond the clicker. Why aren't these just bluetooth and or wifi so my car and open when I pull up and close when I leave? Hell, if they just added an 'open if closed' and 'close if open' it would make it way better for the car to controll. IMO they are purposely making the non myQ options suck and stuck in the 80s just so they can upsell to a monthly subscription.
2. Their security is a joke. After moving to new phone their app would refuse to login yet would still show me notifications for door events. The only way to stop the notifications was to uninstall the app.
My newer garage door is lacking wifi just so I can add my own automation without even bothering with theirs.
I wouldn't call them overpriced (at least not all products), their quality is typically great, you get what you pay for. We have had Hue lights for over 10 years (pretty much every light in our house is Hue) and never had any issues. I think over that period one light broke. And like you said, the integration is great. In our house we have it configured to use both through the Hue hub and SmartThings.
> their quality is typically great, you get what you pay for.
You're lucky. I also have almost all lights from Hue, and in almost 6 years I've had 6 or 7 completely dead bulbs (out of ~40). One more lightbulb failed in a weird way - it sort of worked, but in 90% of cases refused to completely turn off and still kept some of the LEDs lit. I haven't bothered to disassemble it to see how that happened. And one more light works normally, but somehow fails to report its status to HomeKit. It can be controlled but always shows up as "updating..." - guess it's a software bug of some sort, since it works in the Hue app.
No Home Assistant here at the moment, just regular Hue+HomeKit setup. I have tried HA a few times, but found no significant additional value over what I already have. It's just as dumb as all other "smart" home solutions, still has very limited diagnostics if something is not working (maybe if one really groks its internals it can be debugged better, but I don't) and requires maintenance. I was thinking about building something with plain simple Zigbee2MQTT and a bunch of DIY scripts to make it a little smart, but haven't yet had time for this.
Yup. I paid like $40CAD for a single Hue lightbulb in 2017 and it's still going. In that time, I've had countless cheap Canadian Tire brand (NOMA) & Walmart brand LED bulbs burn out and need replacing totaling WAY more than $40.
I just looked and they have gotten like 20% more expensive though... that said, their non-smart bulbs are still pretty affordable comparatively.
We have almost two dozen Ikea Tradfri bulbs and they've been great. We had a few older Hue ones too, those never seemed to keep their state across power loss and their light quality was pretty bad given the price, really not impressed.
Look for Zigbee devices and most stuff just works out of the box. And when you’re not upgrading firmware, there’s no way for the manufacturer to break anything.
Zigbee is wonderful, especially alongside things like zigbee2mqtt device support [0]. The downside is that its not uncommon to see non-compliant devices, or buggy implementations which is almost more annoying.
I recently installed a zigbee thermostat in my bathroom, which turned out to be flooding the network and causing the rest of my network to become unstable
If you’ve got a spare garage remote control, a raspberry pi or Arduino board, a soldering iron, an optocoupler, and a sense of adventure, you can easily integrate your existing garage door opener into Home Assistant or what have you.
In fact, the Arduino starter kit comes with a few optocouplers and instructions for basically exactly this project!
Or you can get a tube of a dozen 4N25 optocouplers for like $8 on amazon.
I am looking to install a garage opener and due to meatspace constraints I will probably have to use jackshaft. Jackshafts are predominantly LiftMaster and Chamberlain => the smarts are myQ, which I don't want anywhere near my network. Genie jackshafts seem fine, but Genie's reputation is bad to the point where garage door companies may refuse to work on them.
These motors also usually come with the ability to hook up a hardwired button. There are a couple of pre-made (konnected, ratgo) solutions or one could jury rig a z-wave relay.
Alternative is Overhead Garage door company that have separate SKUs for the unit, the battery and the smarts so one can pick two and use the same relay (my current plan).
There may be _some_ proprietary shenanigans with LM and Chamberlain hardwired buttons but Overhead's one really seems to just work through bridging two contacts
Just use a LiftMaster/Chamberlain jackshaft opener, never connect it to any network install the ESP32-based ratgdo device into the wiring harness, be done with this issue.
Nothing else compares due to the digital integration. ratgdo uses the simple serial protocol that the opener button uses, so it has access to a lot of information.
Thanks, that's the plan. To be precise - - I thought about getting the opener+battery from Overhead and ratgo/konnected.
Since you mention those two manufacturers specifically -- do you know if there's something that disqualifies the Overhead company's one? One downside that I could think of is that I'd be vendor-locked in for parts when it croaks.
Not sure how it works with a jackshaft vs. the more traditional residential opener, but ratgdo can speak the myQ protocol and control it from mqtt or home assistant. I have it working with my Chamberlain opener as do many others.
Besides the questionable rent-seeking behavior from myQ:
* I don't want to use an integration that needs a round-trip through the cloud to work. Long-term changes are inevitable (company goes out of business, randomly changes API, etc.)
* I fundamentally do not like Amazon Key integration. It gives someone else control over my security hardware which makes me very uncomfortable. I am not sure if it's opt-in or out, but the point is that a myQ device that is installed _can_ be configured to let arbitrary third party to open the door.
If I have a choice, I'd rather set up a system that I control from the get-go rather than try to lobotomize a system that I can't fully control.
Ratgdo doesn't go through the cloud. It's a separate board. You wire it into the opener the same way would a button, and it speaks the serial protocol that a myQ enabled button or console would use. Then it can speak MQTT over wifi.
I never paired my opener with any app nor do I have it on WiFi.
Yes, of course. As a matter of fact -- I will be using one of those solutions myself and pair it with HA.
>I never paired my opener with any app nor do I have it on WiFi.
The opener may be advertising "configure me" network (WiFi or BT) -- which (in theory, depending on how bad did they screw the security up) could allow anyone to pair their app with your opener.
I think it might be better to add it to the network but firewall it off No ingress or egress. This is just so that it no longer advertises the configuration network.
Putting it into a faraday cage should also work but I suppose the firewall way is faster
> Why don’t you want myQ anywhere near your network?
Precisely because they're rent-seeking. I have a wifi-enabled garage door opener that I paid a lot of money for. Why should I have to pay MyQ every month to effectively just let something other than their app or their proprietary switch open the door?
“Near my network” suggested it was a security issue. Are there other companies running a cloud-based api for garage doors that don’t charge? It does cost money to keep the servers going.
I personally just took a cheap remote, attached its button to an esp32 with a relay, put on mqtt, and interfaced it with homebridge. Now it shows up in the home app. Works well! iCloud via Apple TV connects it to the internet securely.
Ah, sorry. I may have misinterpreted your question.
I've only had a garage worth having motorization for a short time. It isn't something I've thought a ton about: While I do have this garage, and it would be nice to be able to park a car in there on a daily basis, and having it be motorized (and automated!) would be great, it's still full of the detritus from moving. Having the door go up and down by itself is pretty low on the list right now and will probably remain that way until the weather gets warmer and drier. :)
When I have thought about it, I've thought that building something myself would be adequate; that I'd just pick any dumb opener that has open/closed IO exposed, and graft on the connectivity functions I need with an ESP32 and some relays, using ESPHome.
Or maybe Shelly modules: One variation or another might have enough IO built in to do it, and they're packaged neatly, priced right, and the default software integrates well with Home Assistant. (They've also got ESP32s inside and can run ESPHome if one is so-inclined.)
Seems easy enough to me, and I've certainly done much more daunting and elaborate integration stuff at $dayjob.
But I don't know of a competitive "just-works" LAN-controllable garage door opener.
If it weren't for the SNAFU a year or so ago[0], I'd probably pick Chamberlain and a Ratdgo[1] board for local network control. But as it stands, I do not want to reward Chamberlain with any of my dollars, and I'm willing to go to any expense in order to avoid doing so.
Hue is amazing, the reliability of their products is truly impressive. I've had ~40 lights for years and not a single one has died or ever had connectivity issues.
At the moment you can pair them with any ZigBee controller, which I found to be much simpler. This is one firmware update away from not working (which is why I mostly relied on Z-Wave) so YMMV.
MyQ are such scum. I love how on my smartphone I can just press a button in the MyQ app to open my garage door, but if I want to push the button on my Tesla, they want to charge me a subscription fee of $100 a year or something like that
It's worth clicking through and reading details on each one before you commit. Most of them are quite complete, but some only support a handful of devices or features. You can also get a sense if the control is local (i.e. no internet connection) or cloud based.
For example Philips Hue is overpriced, but their Home Assistant integration is top tier and ultra-reliable. Contrast that with myQ garage door openers (LiftMaster, Chamberlain and Craftsman) recently breaking Home Assistant support on purpose, to essentially replace it with nothing, and they're dead to me.
So Xiaomi adding support, assuming it is reliable, definitely moves them into a better category.