Opening a garage door from the Internet

Who wouldn't want to be able to control their garage door over the Internet?  No one, that's who.

I've recently mounted a 7" Android tablet in my wife's car to control navigation, music, realtime ODB II data, and various other tasks.  My wife then asked if she could control the garage door with the tablet.  "Well..... you can, but I have to build something to do that."  "Ok, then build it."

The requirements of the build are as follows:

• It must give the status of the door (open/closed/unknown)
• It must be able to toggle the status of the door
• The WAF must be very high
• It must work with at least Android, but all platforms would be ideal 
• It must be secure since it's Internet facing
• It must be reliable and therefore simple

The obvious place for me to start is with a Raspberry Pi - it's cheap, has network connectivity, runs Linux, and I have a spare sitting around the house waiting for a project.

It also seemed logical to make this as a web app instead of a native Android app so 0) it would be instantaneously up to date, 1) it wouldn't cause any battery drain from having to check the status every 30 seconds to stay up to date, and 2) for me, a web app is much easier to develop.

My garage door (like most) has a simple mechanism to trigger opening and closing the door.  Simply short two pins via a push button or, in this case, a relay.  The problem is that a Pi can't activate a relay directly with GPIO.  Well, not safely anyhow.  So we need to a very small amount of power to trigger an NPN transistor in order to trip the relay.  Since I'm using a 5V relay, I can safely pull that voltage from the 5V pin on the Pi.  The diode is there to prevent damage to the Pi when the field from the relay's coil collapses.

The electronics are pretty straightforward. A transistor activates a relay to open and close the door and 2 magnetic switches report the door's status back to the Pi.

The 10K resistors are there as pull up resistors.  Basically it makes GPIO pins 23 and 24 read as "high" unless the switch is activated.  Once the switch is activated the voltage goes to ground and the pin goes "low".

If you look at other projects on this page, you'll notice that I'm a big fan of using Cat5.  It's great: it's cheap, reliable, and able to carry signals over long distances without degrading.  In this case I ran 1 line of Cat5 to the garage and split 3 pairs off of it. The blue pair go to the garage door, the green pair go to the "opened" switch, and the orange pair go to the "closed" switch.

I decided to use 2 different switches instead of one because "not closed" or "not open" is not good enough for this project.  I wanted 2 switches to be in agreement as to the state of the door.  These are cheap door switches from Amazon - about $7 for a pack of 5 but they work great.

The activation circuit.  The blue and blue/white wires go to the garage door.

The switch to confirm that the door is opened

The switch to confirm that the door is closed

I simply soldered the resistors inline instead of bothering with another PCB.
Heatshrink tubing is awesome.

The finished hardware on a shelf in the basement (where no one can see it).

Now on to the software!

I used Inkscape to generate the SVG that I used to display the status of the door.  This project was largely an exercise for me to learn a little about CSS and SVGs.  This is the first thing like this that I've done from scratch and I know that there's room for improvement.  Please share ideas in the comments section if you have any constructive insight!

The idea is that the SVG will have either opaque or transparent doors depending on the status of the magnetic switches when the page loads.  When clicked, the SVG will have an animation of the doors either going up or down.  Once the animation is complete (which gives the door plenty of time to open or close) the page will refresh showing the status of the door as a confirmation. 

The code can be found on my GitHub account here: https://github.com/dhowdy/GarageDoor.

Security is accomplished via Apache with ModSSL and basic authentication.  The guys at DuckDNS and PortForward have everything that you need to access your Raspberry Pi from the Internet.  

Lastly, I have to say thank you to to Kevin Sangeelee for his great write-up on using a Pi's GPIO to activate a relay, Justin McCandless for patching jQuery's GLARING lack of SVG class support, and to Nate Krofft for giving me a huge hand with some of the CSS.  And, since I know that I'm going to get a lot of this... I know that I'm not the first person to do this; I simply wanted to share *my* way of doing this with everyone in case it can be helpful to someone else.

Thanks for reading!