Looking for a ST device that can open entry gates?
I live in a 4 house community and we have an entry gate. It would be nice if ST would open those gates for me as I come into the GPS vicinity. Don’t even need to close them since they are closing up on their own after limited amount of time.
How are the gates controlled right now? If it’s via a momentary push button sort of thing, then you can probably use one of many z-wave relays wired in parallel to the button to trigger the gate action. Basically just treating it like a garage door.
It is via momentary push of a single button. Is there a write up on how to tackle it with z-wave relay?
Yeah, probably somewhere here. Search for garage door setups as this will be pretty much the same thing. There’s a nice Evolve relay that should work for it as long as you have or can get power to the spot where you’re going to wire it in.
Essentially it’ll work like this: There’s two wires that run from that push button to the gate controller. When you push that button it connect the circuit and the gate knows to open.
The relay is going to sit on that same loop… acting like a second push button in a way. It can either be wired up at the gate controller or at the push button. As long as it’s done in parallel (not serial) it should work fine. Instead of physically pushing the button SmartThings will signal the relay to connect for a second and ‘bam’… the gate opens.
You can try my garage door automation with Linear Z-wave relay, the only update to that is that you will no longer have it setup as Doors&Locks in the old ST app. In the new ST app, you will need to do the following:
1)Create a room and add the Z-wave motion sensor(taped to the gate) & the Z-wave Linear lf-20 relay to this room.
2)Set the motion sensor as ‘Prefered Device’ (recommend to use ST multi sensor).
3)In the Web IDE, you will need to make changes to the Device types for the sensor and the relay as follows:
If he’s using an open/close sensor to see if the gate is open or closed (probably a good idea figuring you don’t want to gate to CLOSE if you arrive and it’s already open), then follow the instructions above.
However, you can side step the whole bit about creating a room and just install my SmartApp (See here: Garage Door Control after v2?).
This lets you just tap the button on the Garage door sensor in the Mobile App to open close the door/gate.
@chrisb
That is exactly what I do now. I press the prefered device in the Room (e.g.ST Multi) and the door opens.
Thank you guys. I don’t need to watch if it is open or closed. I only need it to open. Gates are closing up within 15 seconds. So ideally, ST should recognize that I am near home and open the gate for me without pushing any buttons and no matter what car I am in. Or case number two, when some one rings me on a Ring door bell (once I install) I should be able to open the gate from ST if I want to.
Strange there are no “Smart” devices that can learn radio band of the clicker and open/close your garage of gates from the ST or any other smart hubs.