Alright, so I just finished adding the Zooz ZEN16 v2 along with two new tilt sensors and a new Chamberlain wireless 953EV remote for my two doors. My doors are on opposite sides of the house and different levels so not as simple as if they were side by side but the house is still small enough to get it done with one relay and one remote.
Overall the install itself went pretty much as expected.
Step 1: program the remote to the openers. Anyway button 1 of the remote to the main garage door and button 2 to the basement garage door. The 953EV remote appears to support multiple different learn button types of GDO so you need to read the instructions as there is a program button and number of presses to set the remote to your learn button color yada yada yada.
Step 2: crack open the remote and solder some wires to the buttons 1 and 2. Quick test by touching each of the other ends of the wire together confirmed I’ve got good connection and I’m ready for the relay.
Step 3: installed the tilt sensor on each door and added to Smartthings. I bought new Ecolink tilt sensors because I forgot a repurposed my old ones… oh well.
Step 4: connect the remote pigtail wires to the Zooz relay… pretty self explanatory here but button 1 to relay 1 and button 2 to relay 2.
Step 5: powered up the Zooz and added it to Smartthings. Oops, forgot to add the Zooz driver… easy enough - enrolled in the driver, added it and then change the driver. Perfect, now I have the relay.
Step 5a: re-read the instructions on how to get child devices for Zooz ZEN16 ok, did that and added them.
Disappointment time: all the Zooz documentation seemed to imply they had replicated the old Zooz garage door smartapp and when you set the relay to ‘garage door’, then the child device would show up as a native garage door device. yeah… no. Just shows up as a standard switch. Damnit.
Ok… now to build everything manually and add the routines to mirror the logic: double damnit!
Step 6: Use @TAustin wonderful virtual driver to create a virtual garage door. (Vgdo for short)
Step 6a: Now two routines to sync the door status: if tilt sensor open then vgdo open, if tilt sensor closed then vgdo closed.
Step 6b: Now two more routines to actually close and open the door: had to get creative with these: name: close vgdo - if vgdo contact sensor open and tilt sensor open as preconditions and vgdo closed, then trigger relay 1. Name - open vgdo - if vdgo contact closed and and tilt sensor closed as preconditions and vgdo open, then trigger relay 1. I determined I needed to add the preconditions to prevent improper triggering of the relay by one of the other routines which ended up causing the relay to trigger mid door cycle and stopping halfway.
Step 6c: I needed to add a validation test, just in case the garage door is closing but for whatever reason doesn’t close (e.g.: something trips the safety sensor), we need to have the vgdo revert to showing the proper open state - routine 5 - if vgdo closed for 1 minutes and tilt sensor shows open, then change vgdo contact sensor to open.
Step 7: repeat all of step 6 for second door.
Overall opinion:
the chamberlain 953ev remote range sucks more than I expected it to but I was able to find a location between the two doors that works reliably. I may get a cr2032 to USB adapter and just go hard powered for the remote.
Very disappointed that the Zooz ZEN16 claims to have or at least implies they have native garage door support and they even sell a garage door kit but it doesn’t actually add as a native garage door which required basically manually building out the logic with virtual devices and at least 5 routines per door.
Once all the setup was done, it works and seems to work well.
I ended up deleting the child devices and just using the main Zooz relay device for all of my configs as they were not needed - since I ultimately am controlling the doors via the virtual gdo device and not directly via the relay itself.
I do not have all the native status like brbeaird did where you can see real-time closing and opening status but it seems to do the job and keeps the status of the virtual doors in sync with the tilt sensor.
I also have the Meross solution coming mostly because I just want to see how well baked their solution is compared to the Zooz relay option. While I love the 100% local solution- it just feels like it’s half baked.
If the Meross solution adds as a native garage door and I can use my existing in wall sensor wires for the door sensor by splicing them in instead of having to use their exposed wires then I may rip out the Zooz solution.
Anyway, those are my thoughts so far.
Edited to fix some typos
