Building a Raspberry Pi IOT Garage Door Opener - Part 1 (Outline & Parts List)

Want to open your garage door using your cellphone?
This series will show you how to create a simple garage door opener using a Raspberry Pi.

This device came about out of necessity. I only had a single garage door remote and didn't want to risk closing the garage door with the remote still inside the vehicle. I also wanted something I could take with me if I move.

This should work with any garage door that uses a simple internal button to open/close the door.
If your garage has two wires that when connected together causes the garage to open/close, then this will work.


The internal switch connections on my garage door looked like the image above.

We will use a relay (controlled by the Raspberry Pi) to bridge these two connections and as a result trick the garage door into thinking the button has been pressed.

Note
This device is not purely limited to being a garage door opener.
It could be used for anything eg. electronic gate opener

Let's get our head around this.

A Raspberry Pi with a WiFi dongle will sit next to the garage door opener.
We will use a relay connected to the Pi's GPIO pins to bridge the two connections on the garage door to simulate the door button being pressed.

The Pi itself will run a simple python web server (bottle.py) and wait for a command to activate the relay.

This will allow us to trigger the garage door to open/close using a simple call to a URL.
eg: http://192.168.2.254:8080/activate

Once the garage door can be opened via a simple URL call we can use a simple Android app to call this URL

Shared garage? No problem. Simply install the app on multiple phones.

Bits we are going to need

• Raspberry Pi (I used an A+ as it is cheaper and smaller than the other models)
• Power Supply for Pi
• SD Card (Minimum 1GB)
• USB WiFi Dongle
• Relay Module
• Dupont Cables (for connecting Pi -> Relay)
• Case for Pi & Relay
• A standard USB keyboard (for initial configuration of Raspberry Pi WiFi Dongle)

That's it for Part 1.
We now know what we are building and hopefully have a grasp on how it all works together.

Part 2 (Hardware Setup) is now live and can be viewed here.