Lee Hutchinson lives in a suburbian home with a garage (or a carhole, if you’re not so fancy). It’s a detached garage, so part of the nightly routine is to check to make sure the house is all locked up by peeking out the back window.
But actually looking out a window with my stupid analog eyeballs is lame, so I figured I could make things easier by adding some smarts to my garage. The first thing I did was use this fellow’s instructions to cobble together a Raspberry Pi-based solution that would fire off an email every time the garage door opened or closed. I couldn’t remotely open or close the door from inside the house myself, but I could just glance at my inbox to see if the garage door was open or shut in the evenings.
This worked great for a couple of years, until Texas summers murdered the poor Pi.
The replacement Lee ended up picking was a ratgdo—a tiny little board with built-in WiFi that gets wired in to the garage door opener’s terminals.
There’s a lot more to the ratgdo (which, according to creator Paul Wieland, stands for “rage against the garage door opener”) than just HomeKit integration. The device works with ESPHome and speaks MQTT, both of which mean that ratgdo works out of the box with not just Home Assistant but (through it) pretty much every major home automation service.
See how it was installed and how well it works in the article here.
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