I’m trying to figure out the one correct piece of equipment to make this work properly…
Here’s the set up:
2 Garage Doors, both with Meross Garage Opener tech
Wife and I both using iPhones
Smartthings backbone with Alexa integration
The challenge:
Currently, when I drive my car and eave or come back, my garage door automatically opens and closes based on my iPhone being used as a presence sensor. same for my wife and her garage door.
But
When I take her car and leave or come back, MY garage door opens/closes instead of hers.
I’m needing to find some form of presence sensor that I can leave in each car that does the duty of the iPhone instead so the correct door will open/close based on which car is being driven.
The question:
What is this magic piece of hardware?
Tile confirmed that it won’t work. AirTags (with a workaround through ST) won’t, but there’s got to be something that can accomplish this.
The short answer, all of which are discussed in more detail in that thread are:
if the car itself has Geolocation, you may be able to use that
if the car has a homelink button remote, you may be able to use that, but it can be tricky. And it’s not hands-free.
there used to be zigbee arrival sensors, one of which was sold under the smartthings brand-name, and they still work, but they are no longer made, and are hard to find now. They were always problematic because local environmental conditions could throw them off, so they would work really well for some people and then not at all for the next person at a different location. So it’s possible they were discontinued just because they were too much of a customer service headache.
some WiFi routers are really good at identifying when a new specific device joins the network. Or if you have a Smartthings/Aeotec hub, there is a community created edge driver that may be able to recognize the same thing. But that all depends a lot on which Wi-Fi router you are using. If you do happen to have one where this functionality is easy to access, you can just toss a battery powered Wi-Fi device into the car, like, maybe a Shelly sensor ( They have much better battery life than most Wi-Fi devices.) and then trigger off of that.
you can use an IBeacon. This works really well. I use it at my own home. But there’s no direct integration with smartthings, so it will require two additional third-party apps to make it work: one to recognize the IBeacon as it goes in and out of range, and one to accept a Web hook from that receiving station app, and then tells smartthings to do something. Plus you need a receiving station device. So this method is actually pretty straightforward to set up (you definitely don’t need to be a programmer) and will work well, but it can get to be a lot more expensive than the other options.
——
Anyway, details on all of those methods in the thread that started last month.
