I figure I might as well post some stuff to the Fediverse.
I have a Meross MSG100 to add “smart” connectivity to my otherwise dumb powered garage door. To my pleasant surprise, Meross can be hooked up to Samsung SmartThings, and you can set a routine for when you arrive within a certain radius of home (100m is the smallest), it can then open the garage door. It can even be set to note if you’ve been gone long enough (I have mine set to 10 minutes).
For more precise location detection, you have to do a little finangling to get it to be hooked up to the Modes and Routines app where you can then also set a location setting that includes connecting to your home wifi.
The finangling involves setting up a virtual switch in SmartThings (as garage door openers aren’t “supported” by M&R, but a switch is), and having a routine in ST linking the switch’s state to the garage door.
If you don’t have ST Labs (only available in USA and KR), then you can make a virtual switch using Samsung’s own web ui: https://my.smartthings.com/advanced/devices
Anyway, we tested it this afternoon and it worked fine.
For those without a Samsung phone, this will be a lot harder to set up (if not impossible).
My backup options were:
- Getting my Cardo set up (whenever it arrives) and yelling Hey Google open the garage door, waiting for it to go ‘sure, what’s your pin’, and yelling that at it… from like two roundabouts away from home.
- Buying and installing a Riders Magic Touch
- Buying and installing a Mo-Door
- Buying and installing the Garage Door Opener from Vizi-Tec (hooks up to brake line), apparently you do a zip-zip-zip-braaake on your brake and it activates it?
- Taking apart a garage remote and making my own version of any of the above, including like the FlashToPass/FlashToOpen (they don’t exist anymore sadly) which activated when you flashed your high beams
- Tucking a remote into my tank bag and smashing the shit out of it
- Do what I’ve been doing which was stopping, glove off, open jacket pocket, fish out remote and press button, shove it back into pocket, glove back on, roll into garage
Anyone got any other unique ways of managing their garage door whilst on the motorcycle?
I used to use a regular garage door remote, with the clip modified slightly (bending with needle nose) to give it a snug fit on a piece of webbing on the chest of my motorcycle jacket. Just a quick tap on my chest to open/close.
Ditto on the regular remote. I have one if those keyfob sized ones that goes perfectly in the otherwise useless sleeve pocket in my jacket.
I have probably about a quarter million dollars worth of stuff in my garage between the bikes, tools, and machinery that I busted my ass working to afford. So I don’t need to have my garage door connected to the fucking cloud, thanks. I sure as shit don’t need any software trying to determine when to open the door automatically. One dumbass software glitch, one incident of the door being open and unattended even for a few minutes when I’m not home, and the methheads will be making off with most of everything I’ve ever owned.
Fuck that. When I press the button, or not at all.
Yeah sometimes simple is best. Certainly a lot of folks have suggested this. I tend to wear different jackets as the seasons vary wildly here, so not quite as easy an option for me.