I’m not sure if there’s a way to possibly do this, but if there is it would be a huge win for me. I have a MyQ garage door opener with 3 button remote for controlling the garage door opener. I was wondering if there would be any potential way to use one of the remaining 2 buttons to control my Yale front door lock via the Smartthings hub somehow.
I believe with the MyQ, you can use the buttons to control the lights as well as the opener, so as a worst case situation I’m thinking I could have it turn the lights on, then use the lights on as a condition to unlock the front door. The issue with that would be if I turn the light on from inside the garage it’ll unlock the door when I don’t want it to.
Anyone have any ideas if it’s possible to do this?
Are you just talking about one of the standard remotes that send a signal to the door opener? I don’t think those actually interface with MyQ directly. And as far as I know the lights on the garage doors aren’t controllable by MyQ at all, even by their own app.
Would it not work for you to have the front door just lock or unlock depending upon the garage door opening or closing? I have my Smart Lock go locked anytime my garage door closes (WebCoRE rule).
And as far as I know the lights on the garage doors aren’t controllable by MyQ at all, even by their own app.
Interesting. I swore there was a button for it in the app, but now I’m not seeing it so I guess you’re right.
Would it not work for you to have the front door just lock or unlock depending upon the garage door opening or closing?
I’d rather not open the garage door every time we come home. We rarely enter through the garage and mainly use the front entrance. Garage is more of a tool/storage space than a parking area.
Gotcha. In that case, I’d probably just use presence-based rules to unlock the door. Or else get a SmartThings-supported push-button remote or something.
I tried using the phones as presence sensors, they just were to unreliable. We would come home to the door locked, unlock it, enter, put away groceries etc, and then 5 minutes later it would finally register that we were home and unlock the door. I know some people have worked around this with something like Life360, and I may wind up doing that at some point, but figured we both had these buttons in our car and if I could make them work it’d be great.
I could do a separate button, but was trying to avoid having more hardware than necessary. If I go this route, is there anything that would serve dual function as a garage opener and also work with the front door lock that you’re aware of?
For the MyQ, I’m guessing the remote just sends and RF signal to the door opener itself then, and the MyQ isn’t even involved in the process?
Yeah I know lots of people have had trouble with the reliability of phone presence. Mine has gotten a lot better over the years but still isn’t perfect.
The closest thing I can think of would be one of the z-wave or zigbee button remotes (there are quite a few out there). As long as SmartThings can use it, you could easily program each button to fire a different routine; one unlocks the door, the other opens the garage. I’m not exactly sure how the remote behaves if it’s frequently being removed from the hub range…I don’t know if the button would immediately be able to send commands as soon as you pull into range of the house.
But yes, as far as I know, the garage remote is basic RF signal and basically bypasses MyQ altogether.
Yes did more reading about it this morning, and it appears to be a rolling code that operates on 310, 315 and 390 mhz.
It seems there’s a product called Bond that is used for RF ceiling fans, and they have plans to expand to garage openers, but they start at around $90 which is more than I wanted to spend on this project. Was just a wish list item to make it easier, can simply pull up the phone and unlock the door before loading up our arms with groceries for now.
Could just get a smartthings arrival sensor and leave it in your car. I’ve not used one so I don’t know if its better than the phones, but its worth looking at. Here’s a good thread discussing it.
I’ve looked into those a bit, and they seem to be finicky at best. A majority of users report having issues with them disconnecting from the network, which sort of renders them useless.