Introduction: Open Your Garage Door WITH YOUR ANDROID!

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So, long story short, I live in a house with 5 cars and 2 garage door openers. This has proven to be a bit of a problem for years, while rummaging through my parents electronics drawer I came across a "Spark Core", WiFi enabled arduino-like board which works surprisingly well for automating things, such as garage doors. the company has changed its name to Particle, but the board is still the same. So here's how you can use the Particle Core, or probably any other Particle HDK to activate your garage door with your phone.

Components:

  • 1 Breadboard or Protoboard
  • 1 Particle Core or Photon
  • 1 470 Ohm Resistor (optional)
  • 1 50 Ohm Resistor (optional but recommended)
  • 1 NPN Transistor
  • 1 Opto-Isolator
  • Wifi that can reach your garage

Step 1: Make the Circuit

The Circuit is pretty simple but will probably have to be adjusted for your own Garage Door Opener. We have a Raynor Garage Door Opener, it has a very simple screw terminal where a limit switch attaches for operating the door. As long as your normal garage door button is a simple limit switch as well, you should be able to wire it as you see in the schematic on first image. In our case, after wiring the board we ziptied it to a beam holding the door opener to the ceiling, as long as you can get a MicroUSB Charger connected to the board you should be good.

Step 2: Program the Board

The programming is really quite simple, follow Particle's instructions on setting up your board and connecting to Wifi, then copy and paste the code from here into the builder

Flash the code to your device and your done.

Step 3: Install the App

To make life easier I would highly recommend installing a BarCode scanner to your phone. After you have downloaded the scanner, open the first image and scan the QR Code on it. This should prompt you with a link as seen in the second image.

After Clicking the link, you might receive a prompt as seen in the third image, if so select "just once" or "always", If downloading with chrome you will see a scary warning as seen in the fourth image, Thats because this is an app being downloaded outside of the Google Play Store (If someone would like to upload this app to the play store so you don't have to do all these steps, it would be quite appreciated). Just tap the OK button to get past the prompt, wait for the app to finish downloading and open the file from your notifications list as seen in the sixth image.

If all goes well, You will see something like the seventh image. Just tap the install button and wait till you see something like the eighth image. once finished tap the Open button and proceed to the next step

Step 4: Setup the App

After Opening the App you should see something like the first image. In order to use the app you must have an Access Token from Particle. To get the Access Token, go to https://build.particle.io/build/ and select Settings on the Bottom Right hand corner. You can either enter the Access Token Manually, or generate a QR Code with the Access Token and scan it in using the same bar-code app used in the previous step by taping the From QR Code button

After you've entered the Access Token tap the Save Settings Button and then the back button in the upper left corner. You should see something like the third image.

Using the app is simple. To open or close the garage door, slide the slider all the way to the right until the button turns red, then tap the button.

Please feel free to look over the source code here: https://github.com/clwillingham/GarageDoorOpener/t...

If you run into any Issue's just post them here: https://github.com/clwillingham/GarageDoorOpener/i... and I will do my best to resolve them.

If you have any improvements you'd like to add, Please feel free to fork it and send a pull request.