Hey Guys,
I ordered my ZRM-80 for my garage door opener. I have a question around the Presence Sensor and having it automatically open the garage door and unlock my garage door entrance. Once entered, trigger the garage door to automatically close after 5 minutes or something like that. How is this possible and does it happen quickly enough or am I sitting out in the driveway waiting for the presence sensor to register that its home?
This is exactly the setup that I use. I used a self-modified version of the Ridiculously Easy Garage Door program.
When I leave my house the garage will close about 3 minutes after I’ve left. This is a limitation built into the presence sensors. It takes about 3 minutes of missed pings before the hub says that the tag is really gone.
When I come home my garage opens for me automatically, and then it watches my side door for the next 10 minutes. If my side door opens and then closes, it will close the garage door automatically.
As for time: It all depends. There are two factors to take into consideration:
Timing of the sensor. The tag only pings like every 15 seconds or something like that. This is to conserve battery life. If you happen to get in range of your hub right after the last ping, you’ll need to wait 15 seconds for the next ping, then for the hub to report to the cloud that the tag is home, then the cloud to send then command to open the garage, then for the hub to send the command to your garage. That last part happens quickly, but it could add another second or two. So even if you’re hub range is great you could have a 15-20 second wait until the garage starts opening from when you get in range.
Obviously… network range. The tags are Zibgee devices and so have decent range, but there are many factors in place that effect range: Where your WiFi router is in relation to the hub… walls, windows, doors, etc. I used to have very bad range due to some of these factors and there were times I say in my driveway for 30 seconds or more. What I ended up doing was putting a SmartThings motion sensor near a window near my driveway. When plugged in the motion sensor acts as a repeater for Zigbee devices. Now I have MUCH better range. In fact I’ll often see my garage start to open when I’m three or four houses away.
My presence sensor is my iPhone. It works about 75% of the time. The other times I am sitting in my driveway having to get my phone out and open the ST app. One time I just manually opened my garage and started to pull in then presence was detected and the garage started to come down! I luckily tripped the sensor and it went back up.
Still some bugs I guess.
My wife has the zigbee sensor in her car. I have noticed you have to keep fresh batteries on hand for those. My hub is at the other end of the house from my garage. If the battery gets below 15%, it will start to think she left the house and came back. Happened all night a few times.
If you use the Ridiculously Automatic Garage Door program it has a fail safe built in. You specify a number of minutes and it will wait until the tag is gone for that number of minutes before it will respond to a tag return event. This helps to eliminate false positives like what you’re experiencing.
I’ll give that a shot. Has anyone seen a garage door icon that I can put on my z-wave switch in the things display?
Excellent to hear! I plan to try installing my module tomorrow evening. I purchased the presence sensors for everyone in the house.
I can only seem to find directions on installation for the LRM-20. I have one of those coming tomorrow as well but I would like to use the 80 as that seems to be the one of choice. I have a typical garage door opener on my wall. Large Button that opens the door, a lock, and a Light. Do I actually have to modify the button or take it apart and wire in the module to the open button? I can also use a wireless remote from one of the cars.
I have a ZFM-80 that I’m using in a different setup, but it’ll be essentially the same thing. I’m not going to assume you know too much here, so sorry if it sounds like I’m insulting your intelligence. I’d rather give you too much info than not enough.
Here’s what you need to do… first check out the documentation here if you don’t already have it:
http://www.zwaveproducts.com/layout/manuals/ZFM-80US.pdf
Look at the illustration on the top of the second column you’ll notice that you have 3 sets of terminals labeled D, E, and F.
The E-terminals are what we’ll connect to your garage door. You should have two wires or terminals on your garage door that when shorted (connected) tell the garage door to open or close. You’re going to run wires between those terminals and the E-terminals on your relay. Run them in parallel with any existing wires connected to those terminals. (That is to say: don’t REMOVE any wires from the terminals on your garage door. If you do that, you’re existing button won’t work.)
Next we need to connect normal house current to the F-terminals on the relay. The easiest way to do this I found was to simply take an old lamp cord or extension cord… cut off the end opposite from the plug, and then connect the bare wires to the leads. Now you can just plug it in to any available outlet. Makes it easy to remove it later if you want too, and you don’t have to worry about tapping into any house current. If you don’t have an available outlet though you’ll need to connect to house current some other way.
That’s it for the wiring. Now plug in your relay or turn on the breaker and it should be working. There is one important set to do yet software-wise after getting connected to your hub. You need to change the device type from Z-wave switch to a Z-wave Virtual Momentary Contact Switch. You do this in the IDE (if you’ve never messed around in the IDE, let me know and I’ll walk you through the steps there). What this does is makes SmartThings treat this on/off switch and a push button. Once the Hub sees this device turn on, it turns it off automatically, nearly instantly. IF you don’t do this the relay will stay on until you go into ST and turn it off or physically push the button on the relay to turn it off.
So that’s it… should be a pretty easy install. Let me know if anything is unclear or confusing.
Do you have a SmartThings multi-sensor on your garage door?
If so, then here’s what I’d do:
Change the garage door multi to a SmartThings Garage Door Sensor Button. This does three things: First it allows the sensor to determine if the garage is open or close by position rather than by using the magnet. Second, it will change the icons of the sensor from the standard open/close icons to garage door icons. Third, it turns the tile into a button that you can tap.
Install my shared program called “Virtual Garage triggers outlet.” This will look for that tile being tapped and trigger and outlet/relay to turn on when it’s pressed. Now you can use that tile to see if the garage is open or close and trigger it to open close right from the tile rather than having to find the outlet/relay set to control this garage.
I do have a multi that is already setup to use open close based on axis. I don’t have a developer account. I had someone at ST change it to that for me.
How can I get it changed to a button? Right now I just have an open/close sensor and a zwave switch to actually open/close the garage. It has been changed to a virtual momentary contact switch.
Did you change the outlet yourself to the momentary contact switch? If so, it’s the same sort of procedure for changing the multi.
Log into the ide here: https://graph.api.smartthings.com/login/auth
Click on “My Device” at the top.
Find the Multisensor in your list and click on the name, then click edit at the bottom of the screen.
Under “type” click the down arrow to get the list and find the entry called SmartSense Garage Door Sensor Button. Select that entry.
Finally, click the Update button at the bottom of the screen.
You may have to log off and then log back on in the mobile app before the updates take effect.
@chrisb is there any way to modify the SmartThings Garage Door Sensor Button device type to work with an open/close sensor instead of the Multi? Where could I find the code for the SmartThings Garage Door Sensor Button to see if this is something that I could do on my own?
If you’ve worked with SmartApps, it’s a similar process.
In the IDE go to “My Device Types.” From here you can start a new device type. Give it a name and the you need to select the capabilities that this device time can handle. There is very little documentation on this the last I looked, so you’ll probably have to do some trial and error to get it figured out. Once you’ve selected the capabilities, click on the code button (just like the SmartApps) and then you can look at the device type examples (upper right side of the screen) and copy over existing device types.
Fantastic!! Glad to help in anyway I can. I’m certainly not the most expert person here but I’ve picked up a lot of knowledge and tips over the months so I’m happy to share what I know to others.
Where is the best place to see a list of the shared smart apps and what they are intended to do? I can’t really tell based on some of the names and code.
I installed a low battery shared app to immediately find out my presence sensor is at 1%!
lol
Right now the only place to see them is how you’re doing it right now. You have to start a new app, then look at the shared apps.
Eventually SmartThings plans to have a “SmartApp Store” setup where authors can put their apps out for people to see, use, and install in the same way you currently do with the SmartThings supplied SmartApps. But that hasn’t been created yet, so you’re best bet to look at the shared apps and try to figure it out. If the author left their name or email you could always try to contact them directly if you have specific questions about an app.
Another option would be to post in the developer forum with a request. Post a message there saying: “I want to be able to do this…” If someone already has an app that does that they might respond with the info on where/how to get it.