Garage door opener in Android Auto

Apps & Services Google Assistant
1

I have my garage door integrated into OH and a neat setup with the Apple HomeKit add-on that displays the garage door on the Apple CarPlay home screen in my car when I am close to our home. My wife uses Android, so now I am trying to get the same thing done there.

Has anyone done a similar setup?

I’d probably start with getting the garage door opener in the OH Google Assistant Action? Any advice on how then get the garage door onto the home screen in Android Auto?

2

Unfortunately I know of no way to pop something up in Android Auto like that.

However, you are on the right track.

  1. Configure your OH to work with Google Assistant: Google Assistant | openHAB
  2. Configure your garage door Item to become exposed to Google Assistant. I use the “Garage” tag for my switch Items.
  3. Sync your devices any time you make changes to the ga metadata by asking GA on an Android device to “sync devices”
  4. Verify that the device appears in Google Home on the phone that will connect to the car. Depending on accounts and stuff like that you may need to set up a family and share the device. That’s all Google stuff I don’t remember how to do off the top of my head but you should be able to figure it out stumbling through the Google Home settings.
  5. On the Android Phone navigate to Settings → Search for “Android Auto” and select the entry in “Settings”.
  6. Under “Display” there’s “Customize launcher” and once you click that you can tap the + to add a shortcut to the launcher. One option is “An Asssitant action” where you can type in the voice command you’d use to trigger the garage door opener.

It’s not as nice as Auto poping up a dialog as you approach the house but it’s better than nothing.

That’s how I do it but if you have Tasker on the phone you have another option. Tasker will work with the openHAB app directly through a plugin and it has integration with Google Assistant. So you could set up a task in Tasker to command the Garage Item and the use start <name of tasker task> in tasker as the assistant action.

Depending on whether you’ve already set up Google Home with OH or not, the Tasker approach might be less work overall.

Note, you can “compile” a Tasker task/profile into an APK that can be installed on other phones. That means you may only need to have Tasker on one phone and then you can deploy automations to family members through an APK instead of running full blown Tasker on their phones.

3

Thanks for the detailed insights! I‘ll give it a try and report back. :grinning:

4

OK, so I have my first question already. How does the garage tag work in conjunction with a switch item/point? Is the same point used for receiving commands and showing the current status?

Currently I have an OpenState point and a Switch point, however setting the Switch to ON will trigger the gates operation (open or close) and the Switch will then reset to OFF.

5

If the Item is a Rollershutter Item it will show both status and control. I use a Switch Item because the only status I have is a separate Contact showing if it’s open or not. GA is unaware of the status of my garage door, it only allows control which is all I need and I set this up a long time before GA integration supported Garagedoors specifically.

Sending any command to the Switch causes the garage door opener to trigger. So I’ve created a GA Automation that converts “open the garage”, “close the garage”, “open the garage door”, “close the garage door” , “open the large garage door”, or “close the garage door” to “turn on the large garage door”. This will issue an ON command to the Switch. I’ve a rule that triggers on any commands to the Switch Item that actually communicates with the opener (via MQTT in my case).

I probably don’t need that any more since if the Item is tagged with “Garage” in the ga metadata I could probably send “open” and “close” commands to it through GA. But I’ve had this setup for years and never went back to see if there is a better way.

6

Thanks. I also opted for a proxy Switch. I now have rule that reacts to commands to the switch and triggers the garage door, and another rule updates the status of the proxy Switch if the garage doors are triggered by other means. Also in my case therefore Google does not show if the doors are moving, only when fully opened or fully closed the status changes. Using a proxy Rollershutter might be better able to show the moving status, but in terms of control the proxy Switch better reflects what the garage doors can do.

Now I’ll try to get it into Google Auto as you suggested. :slight_smile: