Automating a garage door with a Wemos D1 mini

Last year our neighbours got a new garage door. It was fitted by Verbe Garagedeuren and they nicely removed the old manually operated Polynorm roller door.  The new door is not only firm, it also looks good and it gives a much better insulation than the old door. It also comes with two remotes that you can use to wirelessly operate the door. But when you arrive home and the remote is inside the house wouldn't it be great that the door could also be opened from your smartphone?

Wifi enabling the door drive

An Aperto door drive smoothly opens and closes the door. According to the manual, the ceiling control board has an option to give the system a pulse: a short connection between the button connector on this board gives the same signal as pushing the remote control button. With this knowledge it becomes easy to wifi-enable the door drive. Another good thing is that there is 24V DC power outlet.

Wemos D1 mini

The Wemos D1 mini is a wifi board with 4MB flash based on ESP-8266 chip. The board runs on 5V and combined with a Relay shield makes a great (small) solution to give a pulse to the door drive and act as a gateway to the home Wifi. That gives the following material list:

• Wemos D1 mini 
• Relay Shield
• DC-DC converter  (for example this one at Tinytronics)

 The DC-DC converter ensures that the 24V from the door drive is brought to the Wemos D1 mini voltage level.

Connecting this to the 5V pins of the Wemos D1 / Relay shield combo gives the following setup.

And here is the whole system connected to the door drive:

The DC-DC converter is here covered with black tape. All of this fits easily inside the enclosure of the door drive.

Software

The Wemos D1 can be programmed in many ways. For example it can be flashed with Micro Python, or programmed using an Arduino IDE. Other approaches are the ESPhome or the Tasmota software solution. In this case I've chosen to use the Tasmota solution. This provides a web interface to the Wemos D1 to toggle the relay. 

Hitting the toggle button will give the door drive a signal and lets the garage door move.

Only one small problem remains, the relay should only be toggled for a short time. Here is where the Tasmota command Pulsetime helps out. The command 'Pulsetime 5' configures the Wemos to toggle the relay for 0.5 seconds. Entering that via the Console gives exactly what we want: the door can be opened and closed with a smart phone (as long as it is on the same network as the Wemos D1) with one push of the toggle button. 

Bonus sensor

Recently I've extended the door gateway with an AM2301 sensor. This means that the web interfaces shows some extra information: