Smart Garage Cover

When I bought my new home, I was very excited to finally be able to automate my garage cover. It always annoyed me when I had to push a button to open and close the garage cover, so I considered purchasing the Tesla Automatic Garage Opener for $325. But I simply couldn’t justify the cost for something that should have been a standard feature for the car. Moreover, this would have only worked on 1 car and if I get another car, I’ll have to figure out a different solution anyway. So I decided to purchase a smart garage control device instead, which lets me keep my opener unit but provides smart control via a mobile app. Luckily, I was able to grab one from myQ for free on Amazon Prime Day. This device is also compatible with Amazon Key in-garage delivery, so I can have Amazon deliver my packages to my garage securely.

Alexa, Homekit, Home Assistant

Although myQ doesn’t have official support for Amazon Alexa or Homekit, I was able to integrate it with Homekit through the open-source Homebridge plugin. It also has full support for MQTT, which is how I integrated myQ into Home Assistant instead of Home Assistant’s custom component so that there is only one integration that polls the myQ APIs. From Home Assistant I exposed the garage cover entity for Alexa, so I can also control the garage door with Alexa from the echo dot in my garage. (This obviously requires a passcode verification). With this setup, I can now use voice commands with Alexa and Siri, as well as write some sophisticated automations through Home Assistant.

Automations

Check out my post on getting started with Home Assistant, so you can have a better understanding of my setup and replicate it easily.

For some of the automations, I rely on the data provided by Teslamate. If you don’t want to set it up, you can use the Home Assistant component for Tesla for location instead.

In addition, I also have a proximity sensor configured in configurations.yaml

proximity:
  home_tesla:
    zone: home
    devices:
      - device_tracker.tesla_location
    tolerance: 10
    unit_of_measurement: mi

Open Garage Cover when coming Home

False Positives

This automation uses Tesla location as the trigger and only continues if the cover is not open, the direction of travel is not unknown, and when the tesla shift state is ‘D’ (Drive). This helps with eliminating false positives and doesn’t open the garage cover unexpectedly. An additional check also makes sure it wasn’t closed within the last 1 minute, which happens because if you are leaving the house, but since the zone is circular, you might be leaving and entering before finally leaving the zone. The automation that triggers the closing of the garage cover would have triggered within the last 1 minute if you were leaving the house, making this a false positive if you are trying to re-open the garage cover.

- id: '1629248639702'
  alias: Arriving Home - Open Garage Cover
  description: 'Open Garage Cover when coming home'
  trigger:
  - platform: state
    entity_id: device_tracker.tesla_location
    from: not_home
    to: home
  condition:
  - condition: not
    conditions:
    - condition: state
      entity_id: cover.garage_cover
      state: open
  - condition: not
    conditions:
    - condition: state
      entity_id: proximity.home_tesla
      attribute: dir_of_travel
      state: unknown
  - condition: state
    entity_id: sensor.tesla_shift_state
    state: D
  - condition: or
    conditions:
    - condition: state
      entity_id: proximity.home_tesla
      attribute: dir_of_travel
      state: towards
    - condition: state
      entity_id: proximity.home_tesla
      attribute: dir_of_travel
      state: arrived
  - condition: template
    value_template: "{%- if trigger.from_state.last_changed -%}\n           {{ (as_timestamp(now())\
      \ - as_timestamp(trigger.from_state.last_changed)) > 60 }}\n         {%- else\
      \ -%}\n           true\n         {%- endif -%}\n"
  action:
  - service: cover.open_cover
    data: {}
    entity_id: cover.garage_cover
  - wait_for_trigger:
    - platform: state
      entity_id: binary_sensor.tesla_is_user_present
      to: 'off'
    timeout: 00:10:00
  - condition: device
    device_id: 6aab8620e595ce209825683470e9ee0b
    domain: cover
    entity_id: cover.garage_cover
    type: is_open
  - device_id: 6aab8620e595ce209825683470e9ee0b
    domain: cover
    entity_id: cover.garage_cover
    type: close
  mode: single

Open Garage Cover when Leaving Home

This automation opens the Garage cover when the car is in garage and changes in to Reverse shift state indicating you want to back out of the garage. This requires Teslamat and won’t work with just the Home Assistant component. It also automatically closes the garage cover in 5 minutes or when the car changes into the Drive mode (Shifter state changes to ‘D’).

- id: '1629312819739'
  alias: Leaving Home - Open Garage cover (Teslamate)
  description: 'Open garage cover when you want to leave home and car is in garage'
  trigger:
  - platform: state
    entity_id: sensor.tesla_shift_state
    to: R
  condition:
  - condition: state
    entity_id: device_tracker.tesla_location
    state: home
  action:
  - wait_for_trigger:
    - platform: state
      entity_id: sensor.tesla_shift_state
      to: D
      for:
        hours: 0
        minutes: 0
        seconds: 0
    timeout: 00:05:00
  - condition: device
    device_id: 6aab8620e595ce209825683470e9ee0b
    domain: cover
    entity_id: cover.garage_cover
    type: is_open
  - service: cover.close_cover
    target:
      entity_id: cover.garage_cover
    data: {}
  mode: restart

Close Garage Cover when Leaving Home

This automation triggers every time someone leaves home, or an action was fired from iOS mobile notification.

- id: '1604392289616'
  alias: Leaving Home - Close the Garage Cover
  description: ''
  trigger:
  - platform: zone
    entity_id: person.harshit
    zone: zone.home
    event: leave
  - platform: zone
    entity_id: person.heta
    zone: zone.home
    event: leave
  - platform: event
    event_type: ios.notification_action_fired
    event_data:
      actionName: CLOSE_GARAGE_COVER
  condition:
  - condition: device
    device_id: 6aab8620e595ce209825683470e9ee0b
    domain: cover
    entity_id: cover.garage_cover
    type: is_open
  action:
  - service: cover.close_cover
    data: {}
    entity_id: cover.garage_cover
  mode: single

Forgot to close Garage Cover

This automation sends a mobile notification with action prompt to close the garage cover if it was left open for more than 5 minutes.

- id: '1606623107897'
  alias: Alert - Garage cover left open
  description: ''
  trigger:
  - platform: state
    entity_id: cover.garage_cover
    to: open
    for: 00:05:00
  condition: []
  action:
  - data_template:
      data:
        attachment:
          content-type: jpeg
        entity_id: camera.garage_snapshot
        push:
          category: camera4
      message: It was left unlocked for 5 minutes
      title: Forgot to close the garage cover?
    service: notify.ios_family
  - service: script.text_to_speech_notification
    data_template:
      media_player_entity: media_player.living_room
      speech_message: Garage Cover is left open for 5 minutes.
  mode: single

Alert when Garage Cover opens

This automation calls a script for text to speech notification, which plays a message on living room speakers. Combined with my other automation for previewing the driveway camera image on Netgear Meural, it is a very useful security feature that helps anyone in the house know what triggered the “Garage Opened” event.

This text-to-speech notification script checks if the speech notifications are enabled and if anyone is home before using Amazon Polly for text-to-speech conversion and playing the audio on my Sonos speakers.

- id: '1611615366724'
  alias: Alert - Garage Cover Opened
  description: ''
  trigger:
  - platform: state
    entity_id: cover.garage_cover
    to: open
  condition: []
  action:
  - service: script.text_to_speech_notification
    data_template:
      media_player_entity: media_player.living_room
      speech_message: Garage Cover is opening.
  mode: single

Check out some of my other posts on automations and dashboards for Home Assistant for more ideas.