A while back, a friend gave me the idea of opening the garage door with a Raspberry PI and a relay board. We hooked it to a Nice garage door remote and voila – now it can open the driveway gate remotely. In time, I did this to all of the gates that I had access to like the vacation house, the office etc and then friends asked me to help out with their automation projects. Then it hit me – why not automate this process and make it easier for everyone to set this up. GDO PI provides you with a phone application that lists your gates and allows you to open them remotely. And it doesn’t have to be gates – can be virtually anything that can be controlled by a relay.
What you need:
Raspberry PI Model 3 B+
https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-3-model-b-plus/
Relay Board
https://www.seeedstudio.com/Raspberry-Pi-Relay-Board-v1-0.html
Then all you have to do is to follow these simple steps:
- Connect the relay board to whatever you want to control. Using the board from the above link you can control up to 4 devices at the same time. For example, I control the driveway gate and the arming and disarming of the house security system (3 devices).
- Install GDO PI on your Raspberry PI by following the simple instructions from the Download & Install page. It is just a script that you need to download on your PI and run. The script will install the app, create an account for you on GDO PI platform, configure the app and make it ready to receive commands.
- Install GDO PI on your phone, login with the account you created earlier and you will find your devices ready to be accessed.
There is no programming required, just the following of a few simple steps. Now you can control your automation projects remotely. Provided you assigned geographic coordinates to your PIs the app can automatically open the closest PI by reading the phone’s coordinates. You can also use an NFC tag for easy access to the app. For example, I keep a NFC tag in my car and once I am near one of my gates I just bring the phone close to the NFC tag and the closest gate will automatically open without me even looking at the phone’s screen.