- Back in 2019, I took my 1980s garage door opener
which used to work like this
and made it smart,
meaning that I could control it with my phone.
Unfortunately, while it worked perfectly at the time
the two years that followed have been,
less than stellar to say the least.
See, look, here's the board we were using.
It's not in there anymore, is it?
Fortunately, today,
I think we finally have the ultimate solution.
And since this video is sponsored by Pulseway
that should give you some idea as to what the solution is.
For those of you who are a little slow, it's a server.
It's always a server, isn't it, Jake?
- [Jake] Hell, yeah!
(enchanted playful music)
(garage door rambling)
- When I bought this house it still had
the original garage door openers from the 1980s.
So when I wanted to add some kind of
smart remote control functionality to it,
the most obvious solution was to just replace them.
So I went on Amazon
and bought a smart Chamberlain garage door opener
with the intention of installing it myself,
only to read through the documentation and realized
that it was a $1 a month subscription fee
for If This Then That integration
so I could use my Google Assistant...
A dollar a month?
I was outraged.
I'm not paying a subscription fee.
So instead I spent a whole year subscription worth of money
on this cheap Chinese Relay thing that connects to your wifi
and will actually press the button
just by bridging the contacts for you.
And as I said before, it worked perfectly.
I'd give my voice command.
It would go through my If This Then That recipe
and then click click, it would activate the door.
The only non-ideal thing was that this
has no way of knowing if the garage door is open or closed.
But that was easy enough to install
with a little roost device or with a garage security camera.
Only it's traumatic to think about that time now
because that's when the first major thing went wrong.
I had the audacity to replace my wireless access point.
I went from my ruckus one to my ubiquity one
which should have been fine, except that my Relay
wouldn't connect to the new access point
even after I changed the SSI ID and the password
to exactly the same one.
No problem, I thought, I've seen that before.
All I got to do as a factory rese.., Oh my God!
There is no way to factory reset this thing.
You actually just have to throw it away
if you don't remember to change the credentials on it
before you change your wifi.
So that's okay.
I went and bought a more expensive
and feature rich four channels, Sonoff one.
And it was back to working perfectly.
Until, Okay Google,
open the Volt garage door.
One day, it randomly stopped working.
After some quick Googling,
it turns out that eWeLink stopped allowing
If This Then That integration free of charge,
which after I threw a temper tantrum on Twitter,
I found out was because If This Then That
changed their billing policies,
making it so that eWeLink had to pay far more per user.
I had a call with If This Then That CEO
where it was off the record, unfortunately.
So I can't really share all the details
but ultimately they walked me through how
If This Then That is to survive
they basically have to make some kind of change.
And they feel like allowing individual users for free
to create up to three recipes of their own
and then use an unlimited number of other
already existing recipes,
seems like a reasonable middle ground.
Unfortunately for me, that means that
something as simple as open Odyssey garage door
close Odyssey garage door,
open Volt garage door and close Volt garage door
exceeds the freaking limit.
No bother, said, I.
I will just change all of the voice commands
to activate Odyssey garage door
and activate Volt garage door,
since quite frankly, the Relay stupid doodad
whether it's this one or the Sonoff
has no idea if it's open or closed, anyway.
It was just kind of like a user friendliness thing.
Then it really hit the fan,
my ancient garage door opener that I had spent
all this freaking time smartifying outright died.
So when I called a local garage door installer company
because frankly, I didn't feel like installing it myself.
They basically said, look,
there's only like one unit that we install in everything.
So either you take it or you don't,
and I kind of went, yeah, okay, sure.
I come home from work and sure enough, there it is.
A brand new LiftMaster.
And those of you who know anything about the industry
will probably know that like I glass frames
the garage door opener industry is basically a monopoly
and LiftMaster is owned by, you guessed it, Chamberlain.
The company that I was trying to freaking avoid
because of their subscription fee in the first place.
No problem said, I.
I'll just take the same leads off of my Relay
and plunk them onto the back of the wall unit,
just like before.
No subscription fee for me.
It is what I thought.
But the installer explains to me, and this was very helpful
that these smart garage door openers
no longer actually work the way the old ones did
where they just pretty much closed a circuit.
These ones are only powered by the wires in your wall.
And instead they actually transmit wirelessly
to the garage door opener units,
just like the fob that you have in your car.
So you can't use a relay in the way that you used to,
where you just kind of,
well, bridge the contacts at the back.
Ha, ha, ha, not to be defeated.
I quickly grabbed one of the PCVs out of a wall unit
and soldered some leads of my own to the activation switch.
So that effectively my relay going off
was just pushing the same switch
that I would normally push with my finger.
Ha, ha, ah, genius.
Too bad the system worked too well.
I sent this video over to Maddie from Electra Boom,
showing that while my Google Voice Assistant commands
to open and close the door did in fact work
with my soldered leads here,
unfortunately, the garage door
would also just randomly activate itself.
He explained it to me and it's something to do
with analog circuitry and having a very high level
of sensitivity to electromagnetic interference.
Essentially, what it means is that these wires
coming off of the switch were acting as antennas
and triggering it sometimes repeatedly
in the middle of the night.
I mean, that's a bit of a security problem,
don't you think?
With guidance from Maddie,
I salvaged some capacitors and resistors
from a random donor board that I had kicking around
and attempted to put some kind of filtering on this circuit
in order to prevent it from happening.
But after spending an entire afternoon on it, I thought
you know what, enough's enough.
My wife will not get off my case
about how the garage doors don't freaking work properly.
I'm just gonna use chamberlains own myQ software.
How bad can it be?
Terrible, it turns out
so here's my current setup then.
With the Chamberlain, myQ app,
you can from anywhere the world,
see the status of your garage doors,
how long they've been in that state.
So here you can see the Volt has been open for four minutes
and you can activate them either way.
Well, what's so bad about that?
That sounds pretty great.
Oh, a couple of things.
For starters, it constantly logs both me and my wife out
seemingly whenever our IP address changes.
Like, oh, I don't know.
Say for example, when we're just coming into wifi at home
or just leaving the range of our wifi
and switching over to cellular data,
that seems like a pretty small problem.
And blindness, you might say.
I mean, why are you pulling out your phone anyway.
This whole journey freaking started
because you wanted to open and close your garage door
with a voice command.
Why not just use myQ use integration with If This Then That
which by the way,
they don't charge a dollar a month for anymore.
They now provide it for free.
I'll tell you why,
because it only allows you to close the door.
When I get home at the end of the day
I cannot say, well, okay, well open the garage door.
It doesn't allow it through If This Then That,
So I'm stuck with one of the following;
A, a Relay that randomly opened my garage doors,
and it does randomly close them as well.
So that's good, that's a good feature.
B, an app that constantly logs me out.
So I have to log into it in my driveway
in order to go home to my house.
Or C, a voice assistant that only closes the doors,
but does not open them.
Oh, right, also there is D,
I could just use the stupid fob thing
that goes on your visor, like a normal human being
but it's a huge security problem
to keep those things in your car.
And quite frankly, I cannot be arsed to like,
carry it around with me all the time.
So I know I'll end up leaving it in my car
which is how people break into your house.
So what this whole experience has highlighted for me
is a couple of the big problems
with smart home stuff in general.
One, is unexpected service interruptions
or policy changes that can break
already perfectly functioning setups.
And number two, is poor or incomplete interoperability
between different brands and platforms.
Now there's only so much we can do about the first one,
terms of service can change.
But at least for the second thing
there actually is a solution.
And it's called Home Assistant.
Conveniently, I already have a home server
that's perfectly capable of running Docker containers
or virtual machines already running on Raid.
So we're gonna show you guys the steps that we went through
to get Home Assistant up and running.
Now, what we're doing with it today is pretty basic.
Taking a myQ device
and having it work with Google Assistant.
But there is so much that you can do with this
that we are barely even scratching the surface.
It's super cool.
In a nutshell, Home Assistant
is an open source home automation platform.
It's kind of like If This Then That,
except that you can host it yourself,
and it's a lot more versatile.
Basically, if you can dream it
or well, at least program it,
it's doable with Home Assistant.
Our first Home Assistant inspired solution
was based around using my existing
Sonoff Inching Relay Opener
and then a cheap ZigBee hub and a door sensor.
The idea was that after issuing our chosen voice command
through Google Assistant,
Home Assistant would run a little script in the background
to check the door status and then decide
whether or not to trigger the garage.
That would be to prevent me from accidentally
opening a garage door that was already open,
which would actually close it and vice versa.
Now this is a great configuration
because it relies on fewer cloud services.
But for me, the whole ZigBee thing is a rabbit hole
that I'm not ready to go down yet.
Partly because I don't have to.
It turns out that the fancy new garage door openers
that I splurged on have a direct integration,
thanks to Home Assistant, with support for opening the door,
which really makes those other limitations
seem pretty frustrating and arbitrary, doesn't it?
It'll just take some setting up.
First off, because of the way Google Assistant works,
a few things need to be in place for it to be able to access
your self hosted Home Assistant instance.
First you'll need a domain name that you can use.
So Google knows where to look.
Second, you'll need an SSL certificate
set up for that domain for security.
And third you'll need remote access to that instance
by way of port forwarding.
Luckily for us, there are a few ways
that we can make this a lot easier than it sounds,
but for those of you who don't wanna dabble
in all this techno wizardry
there is a workaround that avoids all of it
as well as helping with the security concerns
of having your Home Assistant instance
being public facing, it's called Home Assistant Cloud.
It's a partnered service
run by the founder of Home Assistant,
where they hosted in the cloud for you.
And then you can actually just
tie it into Google Assistant directly
without any annoying manual configuration.
However, that means that you are again,
relying on a cloud service to host it
as well as paying a bloody subscription,
which was what I was trying to avoid.
So here comes the more DIY fun way to do it,
featuring my Unraid NAS.
Let's check that out real quick.
This is my combination, home NAS and server.
So it's got about 60 terabytes of storage,
which is more than I need, at least for my personal projects
14 core processor, 64 gigs of Ram, and naturally
it's running Pulseway for monitoring
so I can keep tabs on it, have remote access
and of course get notifications if anything goes wrong.
To help you guys follow along, a full text tutorial
on the Linus tech tips forum
will be linked in the video description
because it is simply too much to fit into a video.
First up, snag a domain from your favorite registrar,
for the purposes of this video
we'll be using autopilottonowhere.com.
If you have a static IP, just set it in your DNS provider.
But if your IP is dynamic, that means changing,
you'll need to set up dynamic DNS
or a program that updates your DNS record
when your IP changes.
Since our domain is managed through CloudFlare
the Unraid community app CloudFlare DDNS
works perfectly for this.
Then to proxy our local Home Assistant Instance
into a public facing domain
and to handle the free
automatically renewing SSL certificate
we will use another community app
called NginxProxyManager.
Before we can set up the SSL certificate in it though,
we'll need to set up our port forwarding rules
so that we can actually verify that we own the domain.
This is gonna vary based on your router.
So use your Google-fu if you aren't familiar
but in the ubiquity control panel anyway, it's super easy.
Note, by the way, you'll wanna make sure
that your Unraid NAS or other machine
that's running all this gear
actually has a static local IP.
Otherwise those port-forwarding rules that you set up
could just break unexpectedly.
Back into the proxy manager, set up your SSL certificate
as well as the host proxy with your domain.
And bam, we install Home Assistant
and we can access it remotely.
The sky is now officially the limit.
But like really, with Home Assistant
you could make it turn off all your lights
when all paired devices leave a geo-fenced location
like your house.
Or you could have it turn on your sprinklers for you
at a certain time, unless your moisture sensor in your yard
has detected rain, or if you don't feel like one of those
you can also just integrate it
with the local weather report.
Or you could make a Sonoff button work with a Yeelight bulb.
The possibilities are endless.
In our case we're just simply going to link
my garage door openers, myQ program to Home Assistant
and set up Google Assistant integration.
This is a pretty long process for self hosted peeps.
So follow the instructions
linked in the description for that.
But once it's set up, we can add it directly
to our Google Home app then,
bada bing, bada boom, two garages, yes.
So it's all working in theory.
What about in practice?
- [Google Assistant] Okay nerd.
- Open both garages
And finally works.
Oh man.
I know, right.
So, big thank you to you for watching.
Thank you to Jake for fixing my garage again.
And of course thank you to Pulseway
for sponsoring this video.
Pulseway, if you guys aren't familiar is the solution
to monitoring your systems and your servers.
They've got support for Windows, Mac, and Linux
and they allow you to see all kinds
of important steps on your systems.
Like what the CPU usage is, Ram usage is, storage.
Basic stuff like that, but also apply custom scripts,
roll updates and remotely access your machines.
And all of that stuff can be done
from the comfort of your own chair,
through their mobile apps available for iOS and Android.
So naturally I use Pulseway for all kinds of things.
So let me know if my server is down or unresponsive
or if my storage is reaching a critical level
but you can use it for basically anything.
So learn more at the link down below
and check out Pulseway for yourself.
Even personal users can actually get a lot of benefit.
So guys, do go check it out.
If you guys enjoyed this video and you want the full history
of how this got started, maybe check out the original
where we smartified my OG 1985 garage door openers.
- [Jake] It looks like a (indistinct) here.
- It's so slow, I hate that.
But because we're using the micQ integration
there's no getting around it.
When I was just using the Relay,
I didn't have to wait for that.
- [Jake] Ahhh.
- Yeah, so if I could still use the relay, honestly I would
but this is fine.