Your Barn Door is Open

One compulsive behavior I can't seem to shake is the fear that I have left the garage door open. I count the squares on the front, I measure the light and shadows, I obsess. To tell the truth, even if I had a magic device that would send me a message every time the garage door opened or shut, I wouldn't trust it. I have to see it.

To feed my neurosis, I began working on a combo surveillance camera / garage door controller with an Internet interface. The first thing I attempted to get working was the method of opening the garage door; up to this point it seems like most efforts have been using a relay to close the switch of the hard-wired "big button" for the garage door opener. I wanted to have the freedom to place the device anywhere I wish, not unlike the garage door keypad that comes with most openers now. A spare Chamberlain universal remote was just sitting in my garage, so I decided to shuck it and rip out the logic board within.

The board actually had a fairly nice layout and a hidden third button. I only needed one button... and a way to trigger it without a physical press. Using a complicated tool called a "screwdriver-like thingee" I pried the physical button off, leaving nothing but the leads behind.

Instead of sharp metal prongs, I got the ole' trusty soldering iron out and melted the solder enough to pull the leads out. I replaced two of the leads with pins for easy breadboarding.

I have a weird affinity towards MOSFETs. I'm not entirely sure why. I have a feeling that my affinity to using a MOSFET instead of a relay is similar to most people's opinions on using an Arduino instead of a Raspberry Pi. With such snobbery in mind, I prototyped out a circuit that would use an N-channel MOSFET to close the circuit instead of a switch.

Bear in mind I paid no attention in 6.002x, so my circuit has less to do with elegance and common sense as it did with "let's slap together a MOSFET and pull down resistor." Still, sending the 2.2V from a GPIO pin into the MOSFET's gate pin allows the circuit to close on the garage door opener, sending the door up and down.

Next up is adding a surveillance to the Raspberry Pi using a USB camera I found lying around. The plan is to try out the Motion subsystem, then adapt things as needed. One particular enhancement I'm keeping my eye on is the Raspberry Pi Infrared Camera, which I might pair with a set of IR LED's and a fisheye lens. Doing so may require some patching of Motion, but should otherwise be straightforward.