I bought one of those OpenGarage things some time ago (I don’t recall where but it was quite expensive here in Europe, €100+) and today I found the time to look at it and install it on an old garage door.
The gadget is quite literally an amateur DIY product (almost certainly hand-assembled by the guy selling it) consisting of an ESP8266 and one of those SparkFun ultrasonic sensors in a home-3D-printed half enclosure (the bottom is open, leaving the printed circuit exposed). Apparently there is a newer version with some sort of radio device, but the principle is the same.
The software running on the ESP8266 is equally amateurish (the web UI won’t work without internet access due to references to http://jquery.com/. Yes, http:// not https://, the 8266 is way too underpowered to support meaningful encryption but whatever the developer saw fit to use jQuery for (and not serve it locally) could be served via HTTPS anyway, as it’s going to run on the browser not the device, and the browser won’t complain about HTTPS in an HTTP page (it will the other way around).
Which btw, the choice of an 8266 also means that any “cloud” service that you try to use will be equally unencrypted.
I wouldn’t trust the thing on a garage door that you need to a) reliably open and close; b) when you want it to; and c) only when you want it to.
At the end of the day, it’s just a dry contact switch. Just use a Shelly. Cheaper, professionally made, and way more reliable.
Trying home automation devices is always hit and miss, and it’s not always obvious from the information available online which ones work and which ones don’t. Anyway, this was my twopence.
