This is my first post as I’ve just gotten around to really diving into smartthings (was a bit miffed for non-android in the beginning).
I am attempting to update a 2 door, 3 car garage and a sliding driveway gate all at once. I went down the route of picking up a new chamberlain garage door opener for one of the doors so I could hook it up to myq and play around a bit, and that was pretty straight forward. But now that I’m done playing, I’m looking for a full solution to handle all three entrance points. From the other threads, it looks like it would be pretty straight forward to just hook a mimolite up to the two garage doors. The bigger thing for me is actually getting some kind of connectivity on the gate without replacing the gate opener (which is an old all-o-matic). The gate opener is hooked up to a Liftmaster 412HM Receiver, which is controlled by the normal garage door remotes.
Since the gate is roughly 100’ from the garage, which is another 20-30 ft from my hub, I was going to go with something zigbee for distance, but then it looks like I’d have to buy the smartthings motion detector as it appears the zigbee plug is still unavailable. I already have two outdoor z-wave plugs, I’m just afraid of the distance (actually, I’m probably overestimating the 100’).
Would a mimolite work for the gate opener and do I hook it up to the receiver or to the actual board that the receiver is hooked up to? I’m much more familiar with garage door openers, but I just added a wand to the gate and it was pretty straight forward. Any help is appreciated, and sorry for asking for help on my first post
Apologies for a delayed reply. I basically ended up taking a garage door opener that was also tied into my gate and soldered wires to a Remotec Z-Wave ZFM-80 to do the opening and closing. Not sure what your level of electronics knowledge/skill is, but it’s actually really easy to do. I’m not a huge fan of the solution because I really wanted to know when the gate was open through smartthings, but I settled for this solution because I also have cheap wifi cams all over my property, indoor and outdoor, and can check the actual visual of the gate after I click the button to open/close. If you need any more help, let me know, as the steps are pretty easy (the whole thing is in a little plastic box, and plugged into the ceiling in my garage and sitting on one of my garage door openers).
Thanks for the reply! Turns out I just wired a Fortrezz MimoLite DC relay in parallel into the gate, which already had a Liftmaster wireless controller installed. So now I can open the gate from ST / phone.
I agree, Open/Close is important! I next want to add an open/close sensor, but as far as I can tell there are no such sensors rated for outdoor installation. My plan is to rig up an Ecolink door contact sensor in a waterproof box using a spring-loaded steel cable that moves when the gate opens/closes. A bit complicated, but should work while keeping the contact sensor dry.
Finally, would be great to open the gate (along with the garage door) with Presence sensing. My initial experience with my Presence Sensor is 1) it is not consistently reliable and 2) it picks up my car’s presence a bit early…so the gate may begin closing by the time I actually arrive. I’m sure all this will improve with time. To be continued…
