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Garage Door

Garage Door

To automate your garage door you will need a simple Z-wave relay and a sensor to determine if the garage door is closed or opened. Depending on your home controller there are many ways to accomplish this but here are two examples.

Vera controller:

Z-wave FS20Z-1 Relay: http://www.amazon.com/GoControl-Z-Wave-Isolated-Contact-Fixture/dp/B00ER6MH22

(there is more expensive version out there from Evolve called LFM-20 and I have both of them. They both do the same job so why pay more for the same functionality).

LFM20

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Z-wave Tilt Sensor: http://www.amazon.com/Ecolink-Z-Wave-Wireless-Tilt-Sensor/dp/B00HGVJRX2

tiltsensor

Smartthings Controller:

Z-wave Relay: http://www.amazon.com/GoControl-Z-Wave-Isolated-Contact-Fixture/dp/B00ER6MH22

LFM20

Z-wave contact sensor: https://shop.smartthings.com/#!/products/smartsense-multi

flat-multi

You will also need to install a plugin which controls the logic for the garage door. You could program this yourself as the logic is not very complex but why should you reinvent the wheel. The logic has to include things like trigger the garage door and let it run until it is closed and then check the sensor if the garage door is closed or open. It also has to cover the relay function as each garage door opener is different but they all have a certain logic in terms of how long a contact has to be opened or closed to perform certain actions. Just installing the Z-wave devices will NOT work out of the box.

I would also recommend to purchase a project box either at Home Depot or at Amazon to put the Z-wave relay and the wiring inside. The good news is that typically each garage door outlet on the ceiling has 2 power outlets so you can use one to power the garage door opener and one to power the Z-wave relay. The project box below placed on the garage door opener was purchased at Home Depot.

Garage Door

The Tilt sensors are typically battery operated and you can either screw them on the garage door or use Velcro. My battery lasted over 1 year before I had to replace it.

Garage Door Sensor

I would also recommend to create some logic in your home automation controller to make proper use of the setup above.

The most common use case is GEO fencing. GEO fencing is the term for location aware reaction of your home automation system.

geo fence In this example you create either one or two virtual fences around your home. The first fence is very close proximity e.g. 100 to 200 feet to capture if you leave your home. The second fence could be a couple of miles.

Most people go with one fence only but others go with a second one to e.g. set the temperature of the home to a more comfortable setting so by the time they get home, the house is nice and cool or warm and cozy.

In this case most people program their garage door to open when they approach their inner fence (or only fence). The opinions differ here because some people don’t like that as they only want to pick something up and they don’t plan to enter the home and in this case they don’t want the garage door to open.

In either case it is up to the individual to decide if GEO fencing is something useful and desirable assuming the person is ok with having location tracking enabled on their cell phone which most people don’t to save battery life.

Another use case is to warn people if the garage door is left open. There are people out there who purchase a camera just to check if the garage door is really closed or not. With the setup above you could program things like “If night and garage door open for more than x minutes then alert”. There are many ways to notify people and many rules you could create and again it depends on the end user but I hope the examples above sparked some ideas.

Happy Automation!

 

Doorbell Z-wave Integration

Doorbell Z-wave Integration

To integrate your existing conventional doorbell into any existing Z-wave eco system, you have a variety of options to go about it. The method I chose was the easiest while requiring a little more hardware in terms of having to mess with timeouts, repetitive doorbell pressing, too long presses of the doorbell, etc.

Z-wave Doorbell Integration

Here is the hardware (total cost $60):

Elk Project Box

Relay

Door/Window Sensor Option 1

Door/Window Sensor Option 2

Integration process:

The N.C. terminals of the relay are wired to the external terminal connector on the Everspring window/door sensor, preventing the sensor from always showing as tripped in the home automation system.

SM-103

The relay is powered from the existing 24V power in the doorbell when the button is triggered and it also covers quick presses or long presses which otherwise could cause scene issues with your existing home automation system.

doorbell

Connect the “white with blue stripe” wire and the “white with yellow stripe” wire from the relay to the transformer terminals. Then connect the solid “yellow wire” and “solid blue wire” from the relay to the wire input terminal on the Everspring door/window sensor.

Integration into Vera or any other home automation is a breeze now. You create a trigger scene.

Doorbell Vera Trigger

Once the doorbell is being pressed the SM-103 will change state which you can detect with a trigger and then this could start any desired scene. As you can see in the video below the doorbell triggers a scene which makes Sonos speakers announce that somebody is at the door. You can control lights, etc as well.

If you want to get really fancy you can use PLEG and after you install the night/day plugin on Vera you could do things like “If night and doorbell pressed then enable front door light and announce on speakers” otherwise “doorbell pressed then announce on speakers”.

You will also see in the video below that the doorbell triggers the tablets to open the video app to show on all tablets in the house who is at the front door. I will cover this in the next post on how to integrate a video intercom system with the doorbell system.

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