The magnets leave about 3/8 of an inch of play room. So, I used magnetic reed switches on the doors because they were much easier to position than a micro switch. My problem was getting three miles away from home and wondering if I closed the doors or not. Anything other than closed would mean I had to pay attention to them for some reason or other. I have two garage doors and wanted to know if they were closed. Lefty’s right in the various modes of the door, but I ignored that for my door sensors. If I'm just biting off way too much before even learning how to chew you can let me know that as well. I assume I will then need to run a wire from each sensor to my Arduino box which I will be, eventually, setting up just next to the manual push button.Īny ideas and suggestions or any scenarios that some of you have already done would be greatly appreciated. What should I be sensing however? A physical connection? Light coming in or going out (would not work well at night)? Infrared passage? I assume that's going to require 2 separate sensors: one towards the bottom to detect closed and one up top to detect open. I would like to be able to test both situations: open and closed. It's a rollup garage door which is already motorised with a big manual push button inside, a couple of radio-based remote controls and a horizontal reader near the floor which tests if there is an object inside the doorway (ie a car) and which deactivates the opening/closing. My question is therefore as regards the physical aspect: what would you recommend as the physical system to verify if the garage door is currently open or closed? What sort of sensor would I attach? The long-term goal will be to use the Ethernet PoE version as I already have Ethernet cabling in the garage and PoE switches.

I have Arduino Unos and I have an Arduino Ethernet PoE and I have an Arduino WiFi shield. But for now just the verification part will do. Later I'll go for the ability to open and close it. but as part of my first project I want to be able to test if my garage door is currently open or closed. I am very much a software guy and it is the hardware, electronics, aspect of each project that is going to require me seeking out handholding wherever possible. I am very new to Arduino but very old to programming.

Foresee garage door opener manual