Category Archives: garage

Garage Distance Sensor Kicks Tennis Ball To Curb

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Those with small garages might be familiar with the method of hanging a tennis ball from a ceiling to make sure they don’t hit the back wall with their car. If the car isn’t in the garage, though, the tennis ball dangling from a string tends to get in the way. To alleviate this problem, [asaucet] created a distance sensor that can tell him when his car is the perfect distance from the garage wall.

At the heart of the distance sensor is an HC-SR04 ultrasonic rangefinder and a PIC16F88 microcontroller. [asaucet] uses a set of four LEDs to alert …read more

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LiftLocker Keeps Your Lift Safe from Attacking Garage Doors

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Car lifts used to be a tool reserved for professional mechanics. Times are a-changing though. With the advent of reasonably priced four-post hydraulic lifts, more and more shade tree mechanics are joining the five-foot high club. Installing a lift in a home garage creates a few hazards, though. What happens when a family remotely opens the garage door while there is a car up on the lift? Garage door and lifted vehicle will meet – with expensive and/or dangerous results. [Joe Auman] saw this problem coming a mile away. He built the LiftLocker to make sure it never happens to …read more

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Open Your Garage Door With Your Smartphone

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The eternal enemy of [James Puderer]’s pockets is anything that isn’t his smartphone. When the apartment building he resides in added a garage door, the forces of evil gained another ally in the form of a garage door opener. So, he dealt with the insult by rigging up a Raspberry Pi to act as a relay between the opener and his phone.

The crux of the setup is Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) — a Google service that allows messages to be sent to devices that generally have dynamic IP addresses, as well as the capacity to send messages upstream, …read more

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Garage Door Opener Logs to Google Drive

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A garage door opener is a pretty classic hack around these parts. IR, Bluetooth, WiFi, smartphone controlled, web interfaces — we’ve seen it all.  But if you want to keep track of people going in and out, you need some way of logging what’s happening. You could go ahead and roll up your own SQL based solution, tied into a custom web page. But there’s an easier way; you can build a garage door opener that logs events to Google Drive.

[WhiskeyTangoHotel] was looking for an ESP8266 project, and a garage door opener seemed just the ticket. It’s simple enough …read more

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Fingerprint Garage Door Won’t Open Every Time A Neighbor Microwaves a Burrito

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With three kids, including himself, [Dave] faced the very real likelihood of someone absent-mindedly leaving the garage door open and being robbed blind. Rather than installing some plebeian solution, he compiled a feature list. And what a feature list it is!

The garage door needed to notify him of its status with strategically placed LEDs around the house, and give him full control on his devices. He wanted to open and close it using his existing key-code entry system. Lastly, it would be extra-cool if he could add some biometrics to it; in this case, a fingerprint sensor.

The core …read more

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