Hi, I’m new to home automation and smartthing and have just started automating my home. I’d like to connect my electric gates to smartthing and was wondering if anyone has done this or knows the best way to go about this?
My gates are controlled by a chamberlain liftmaster cb11 board. I have a wire that runs from the board to my house and this connects to a push button that opens and closes the gate.
Thanks in advance
David
Can’t help much but that button will just be opening and closing the circuit i presume so I guess any kind of compatible relay should work in its place.
You would need to know the voltage.
Or you may be best waiting for someone who knows more about it than me lol
you will need something like raspberry pi probably. i looked into it with my old gates but after spending time with ST i learned it wasn’t trustworthy enough. you don’t want your gates opened while you’re gone.
There will be several different ways to do it with, as was mentioned, the caveat that occasionally smartthings goes bonkers and might open or close the gate unexpectedly. You will see a number of reports in the forums from people talking about a light coming on expectedly or even a garage door opening. 
If you’re OK with that and you want to just to start exploring, take a look in the community – created wiki on the quick browse lists in the project report section and look for the list for gates. Some of those will just be looking for locks, but there are a couple that wanted to do automatic openers.
There’s one more option which is really simple to use and won’t require any wiring, but it’s expensive. There’s a little tiny actuator intended to work as a robot finger specifically for pushing a button and it has an IFTTT channel so you can get integration with SmartThings that way. But it costs about $89 for the controller and another $49 for the button pusher, so it may be more than you want to spend. I do use them at my house, but I’m quadriparetic so button pushing is a big issue for me.
You can find recent discussion of the microbot option in the following thread about an old air conditioner:
Hi.
I used a relay, a solenoid and the original gate remote control.
Maybe a bit tricky for a beginner.
When I press on the relay it feeds the solenoid and the trigger pushes the button
Thanks for the info.
I didn’t realise that smartthings might open / close the gate unexpectedly! The fabaro relay looks like it would work for my purposes but I think I will need to update my gates with some safeties so it doesn’t close if something is going through it.
How often does smartthing suffer hiccups with unexpected things happening?
It’s completely unpredictable, and is itself a symptom of any of several different possible problems.
Some of this you can plan around. For example, if you have a rule based on you arriving home, and arriving home is based on your cell phone, and you turn your cell phone off completely and then turn it on again, your system might think you had just arrived home, thus triggering your arrival home rules. To plan around that, you might require two checks to verify that you have actually left or you might increase The amount of time your phone has to be away before it counts. Or you might have two devices they have to report before action is taken.
But some of it is just random and it can be caused by a problem in the Cloud that then affects your own account.
There are many people who never see this problem ever occur. But there are some who have seen it occur multiple times. There’s just a lot of randomness to it.
I have a similar setup to the OP. The close or open the gate, the button completes the circuit when the button is pressed.I wired a Fibaro FGS-212 Relay (i.e. the first generation with dry contacts) to the Button in the wallbox behind the button.
There is a DTH which is supposed to put the relay in toggle mode so that it works as a momentary switch, but I could not get it to work. I solved the issue in a somewhat lopsided way, but it works fine - I created a Simulated Switch for the gate and a WebCoRE piston to turn on the relay when the Simulated Switch is turned on. The same piston watches the simulated switch and immediately turns it off as soon as it is turned on. The relay is turned off at the same time. The result is that the Simulated Switch effectively works as a toggle - as soon as it is turned on, the piston immediately turns is off. The relay obviously closes for a moment, which is sufficient to Open/Close the gate.
Hello, this is exactly what i am looking to do. Would you be able to share you piston with me.
Thanks.
I would not mind, but I am unfortunately not using the piston anymore and don’t have a copy.
From memory, I believe all I did was this:
If Gate Switch turns on;
Wait 2 seconds
Turn Gate Switch Off.
Reviewing old posts on controlling electric gate brought me to your post 
You mentioned a dry-contact relay connected directly to the remote control. How did you connect the relay to the remote control?
Cool! 
Thanks for sharing!
Hi again,
Another question please - did you connected any power source for that Fibaro module that you used?
To the Fibaro I connected mains power, but I think it also takes 12/24v…?