We are looking to control a driveway gate from ST, with a twist. Here is our setup:
-House is approximately 1000’ from road, with tons of trees between. We have installed a mighty mule gate opener at the road. Obviously, the built in remote does not work
-We have a barn approximately 500’ from the house (half way to the road). We’ve trenched ethernet to this building and have expanded our wifi and hardwired LAN here. It’s working very well. We are preparing to trench power, ethernet, and a control wire for the mighty mule gate from the barn to the road, with the goal to be able to control the gate from ST and have an ethernet camera at the gate. Wifi is not an option for any of this due to the density of the woods, terrain of the land, and distances involved.
The ST hub is in the house, so we only have wifi in the barn (no zigbee or zwave), which is where the control cable (just planning on using #16 landscaping wire to run for the gate) will originate. While researching this forum and others, I came across Sonoff switches which appear to have SmartThings support. I am wondering if anyone has experience with this switch:
My goal would be to join it to ST over wifi in the barn, then plug the control cable for the Mighty Mule gate opener into it. This would then allow us to control the gate via ST. Thanks!
Sounds like a nice place! I have been using one of these for the past few months to control my electric gates. I set it to ‘inching mode’ and it shorts the connections for 0.5 second which instructs the gate to open or close.
I don’t have any experience with magic mule stuff but as long as it works on the same principle as mine it should work… Mine has been flawless so far. You just add via ewelink app and link that to smartthings.
I have a widget set up so it’s easy to press as I drive up.
Edit: added bonus with that model is that it’s powered either by USB micro at 5v, or will run on other voltages via the terminals. I just nicked some spare power from an output on my gate controller and housed it inside.
If you want to ditch the Ewelink integration, you can flash the device with Tasmota and use with the Tasmota custom DH and SmartApp. It is not an out of the box solution, but ditches the Chinese servers. And you can control the device on your local network from a browser as well if your Internet would go down.
For compatibility with Mighty Mule have a look at the GoGoGate database, if it has a contact what you need to short to open or close then you will be good.
For sensing open close state, try to find a wifi open/close (contact) sensor. Tuya has many different, but I have no idea which one works with ST.
What country are you in? The device selection does vary.
Also, regardless of what you select, one of the primary challenges for this kind of set up is weatherproofing the device in a way that doesn’t significantly reduce signal range. So where you live can have an impact in that sense as well. Designing a solution for a Minnesota/Canada winter would be quite different than designing one for Los Angeles.
Thanks all! Located in South Carolina, US. I have already welded up and installed a nice metal weatherproof box for the gate controller, battery, wiring, etc. The underground wiring would obviously be protected by conduit entering/exiting the ground. Since the Wifi switch would be inside the barn (which is finished and climate controlled), I don’t think that weatherproofing would be an issue there.
I’m a little confused when you mention signal range. The entire purpose of this setup is to eliminate signal as any sort of an issue since it would all be hard wired. The only “signal” present would be the wifi switch to wifi access point in the barn, which would be sitting next to one another.
