“There are lots of garage door monitor projects on hackster.io and other Maker sites. Many are single-purpose solutions. I wanted a project that would be extensible, to build on the skills learned for future IOT projects. In fact, I already had a project in mind, a general notification platform called the Kinetic Courier. That project could include a garage door monitor as an example notification trigger.
Also, I wanted a platform that was well-documented and well-supported. Adafruit’s cloud service for Makers, adafruit.io, fit the requirements. In addition, I was motivated by personal need. My nice neighbors had, once too often, called late at night to remind me the garage door was open ;-)
This is largely inspired by and based on the Adafruit IFTTT Door Detector project by Todd Treece for Adafruit, and other work as mentioned on reddit , with a few code tweaks and add-ons.
Where my project is different:
GarageDoorMon doesn’t use a battery, it’s powered by a 5V adapter; you’ll need a long wire from the door and place the Feather Huzzah near a mains power source
Logic is reversed, a ‘1’ is sent to adafruit.io when the garage door is open, ‘0’ when closed(SHUT)
Added: raspberry pi zero W runs a system service to monitor the door status, shows on 4-digit display
IFTTT is not required! Of course, you can use it if you like, in addition or instead.
The pi zero W uses MQTT subscribe directly from adafruit.io feed, via python cllient code.
Overview
An Adafruit Feather Huzzah checks whether the garage door is open/shut via a magnetic switch, then sends the current status to an adafruit.io feed. Inside the house, a Raspberry Pi Zero W with a 4 digit alpha display subscribes to the feed via MQTT and displays the current status. You can also get a notification on your phone from IFTTT.”