So I wasn’t sure which topic to place this under so I thought I would just put it here. I have a garage door opener transmitter built into my vehicle but I don’t have a garage. I thought it would be kind of nice though if when I pulled up in front of my house at night I could press one of the garage door buttons and have it turn on the porch light and maybe an indoor light. I don’t know if there’s a garage door receiver I can get though that will integrate with OpenHAB or Insteon or anything like that. If anyone has any ideas I’d appreciate it.
I’m not certain regarding the garage door opener built into car. But you may have some other options available.
I have not experimented yet with geofencing. But with the use of your cell phone, you can probably have various lights turn on as you approach your home or driveway. And with rules have them turn on on at night time only, etc. I think is something else regarding the use of your cell WIFI and your router, etc that when your cell phone enters your WIFI network you can has OH do an action, etc.
Perhaps someone who has done that can weigh in better on their setup?
You may also need to buy a compatible transmitter to program your car. Essentially, you would need to program your car with the transmitter, then connect something to the contacts from the receiver. If I were doing it, I would probably use a z-wave contact, which would report OPEN or CLOSED to openhab. I would use transitions of that state to control the lights. But you have many options for receiving the state of the lines from the receiver (e.g., Insteon contact, GPIOs on Raspberry Pi or Arduino).
I’ve done this using IFTTT. You do have to have MyOpenHAB configured, but from there it is easy to generate recipes. I have one that is triggered based on if I enter/leave my home based on my phone’s GPS location as well as another that is triggered when I connect/disconnect to my home wifi. I have rules that turn on/off lights based on these as well as arm/disarm the home alarm. Very easy to accomplish but you are relying on a third party service for uptime. I am using OpenPaths to track my wife’s location on her iPhone (IFTTT won’t install on her version of iOS) and the OP site has been down for several days.
Yes, you need to set up MyOpenHAB to use IFTTT. Set that up then get an account with IFTTT. Add the Android Phone and/or iPhone channels as well as the OpenHAB channel. After that it’s really easy to create the recipes.
Create a new recipe. If ‘Android Phone disconnects from specific Wifi Network [Your network name]’ then ‘Send a command to item “Presence_Dinki_Phone_Wifi” OFF’ . This will toggle the switch to OFF indicating that I am no longer connected to my wifi which means I’m probably not home. This is not fail safe so you may want to add another.
Create a new recipe. If ‘Android Phone exits an area [pick your home and a geofencing boundary]’ then ‘Send a command to item “Presence_Dinki_Phone_location” OFF’ . This will toggle the switch to OFF indicating that I am no longer within the boundary set for my home location.
Generate separate recipes for connection to wifi and for entering the home location area to turn the switches ON.
You’ll then want to check both of these in your rule with an AND statement to make sure that I didn’t just lose WIFI or if my phone did something wonky with GPS. You’ll also need to set your switch items up before you can use them in IFTTT. You also will need to run the IFTTT app on your phone(s).
Again, you are depending on a third party web service so keep that in mind for any mission critical functionality, but IFTTT has been around for a while and seems to be mostly reliable. I set up an OpenPaths account a few weeks ago and it worked well for a while but the site has been inaccessible for several days now so be reminded that, while this method works well when it works, it is not superior to a localized solution IMHO.
