Open and Close Your Garage Door with Raspberry Pi

Automatic garage door openers were certainly a wonder when they first started appearing in homes many years ago. Today, however, carrying around a separate remote when you have a perfectly good general purpose wireless device in your pocket (i.e. smartphone) seems a bit clunky. Fortunately, garage door openers tend to be very easy to augment, often featuring a set of exposed terminals that allow control via a general purpose Wi-Fi device such as the new Raspberry Pi Pico W.

As shown in the Core Electronics video below, and explained further in the project write-up (including MicroPython code), Michael Ruppe was able to use the Pico W to control his garage door opener, hooking it up to the up/down/stop terminals with a trio of transistors. These transistors pull each of the input terminals to ground when signaled by the Pico W, which runs a web server for interface. This setup enables you to navigate to the Pico W’s IP address with a phone or other device, where you’re presented with a simple interface page to actuate the door.

Ruppe reports that this simple interface is actually more responsive than his standard dedicated remote, and it’s certainly more convenient. Expanding on it further, you could assign a static IP address to the device to make it easier to find on the network. He is actually using a Pi Hole on his local network, which sends garage.door traffic to the correct IP address, making things even easier.

For testing, the circuit is “temporarily” mounted by leaving the wires hanging, with the door opener cover replaced. On the other hand, Ruppe notes that nothing is more permanent than a temporary solution, so who knows where this project will be in a year or two.