Garage Door controller using Raspberry Pi Zero

[roger.wills]

Finally got Raspbian Wheezy installed and working on RPi Zero and HG installed. The 8 led flashes problem I had not seen before and it took a while to find out that I needed to update Wheezy in another RPi before it would work on the Zero. All sorted now. Things are quicker, changing screens is laggy but at least dealable with now.

OK, will get to the GPIO configuration over the weekend sometime!

[kevin1]

Are you planning to keep HG running on your PC?  If so, I don't understand why you would also want to run HG on this RPi just to control garage doors.  Seems like way overkill to have HG server running when all you need to do is control/monitor a few GPIO.

To me Arduino is best suited for something like this, a node/sensor/controller.  RPi is better suited to something needing more CPU like a server/GUI.

Just curious :-)

[roger.wills]

I have the Pi Zero. Simple as that. I agree it's an overkill, but if it works, happy days!

[[email protected]]

Might be overkill but for the price why not..

Work on the basis that its the door at the moment, but why not add a camera too it.. then put a switch on each garage door to monitor those, for £2 you 'could' throw a ds18b20 temp sensor inside and outside to get temperature.. then add a relay and PIR to do outside lighting based on whether the door is open..

Or go one step further and use the camera to do ANPR http://jamiej7.wix.com/anpr-on-raspberry-pi

[kevin1]

The Pi0 doesn't have a camera input or a network interface either; so you will need a micro-USB adapter cable and USB WiFi/Ethernet device ($10?) to connect it to the network.  All of this except the camera stuff can be done with ~$10 ESP8266 type board which has builtin WiFi. 

I don't mean to be critical of this project.  I am just thinking you can use the powerful Pi in a more worthy role, like as your primary HG server connected via HDMI to your HDTV :-)  Or make an R2-D2 or  BB-8 or arcade game  or . . .

[roger.wills]

Just come back from the Star Wars film, a BB-8, now you're talking!

[roger.wills]

Overkill or not, I have HG running on the RPi Zero with a Wheezy distribution!

It's pretty quick to report status changes to another instance of HG running on a PC. The UI is ok, a bit slow, but usable.

So far I have managed to implement pushbullet reporting on a magnetic door sensor. The code is running on the PC rather than RPi Zero, the latter is merely monitoring the sensor and reporting changes in status. I'm working on adding a second sensor for another door that my wife uses and then I'll hook up some relays to open and close the garage doors on command.

I have to say, now that I have got this far, HG really is showing its strengths. Integration between HG instances is really impressive and seamless.

Very impressive Gene, thanks a lot. 

Roger