Indigo: home Automation on the Mac – part 3 – IP Garage Door control
adding IP control to your garage doors is a great little home automation project for a wet weekend and it really shows the power and simplicity of Indigo.
The easiest way to interface to a lot of garage doors is through their manual push button control. These are usually securely inside the property and using them removes the need to try and link up with the a lot more complicated and potentially less reliable wireless operation of the doors.
Indigo supports lots of relay controllers by means of its 3rd party plugin program and we chose to use the Global Cache IP2CC iTach TCP/IP to contact Closure which supplies a set of 3 relays to activate devices over your network and by means of the Internet. Our’s is the Ethernet version visualized but it is also available in Power over Ethernet (PoE) and Wi-Fi versions too.
Next we added the Cynical Caché Plugin from ‘Perry The Cynic’ to our Indigo system. Installation is as easy as un-zipping and double-clicking the downloaded the file.
Like wise, setup is basic starting with the addition of a new device. Choose ‘Cynical Caché’ from the ‘Type’ drop-down and ‘Network Device’ from the ‘Model’ list. Name your device and hit the edit device settings button.
Here you enter the IP address of your IP2CC unit. There are 3rd party Mac versions of the iHelp, iLearn, iTest, and iConvert Global Caché utilities here that you can use to find the IP address of your unit.
Next create a new action group that you can call on to operate your doors.
Choose the right item from the three relays and have it turning on with an auto-off to simulate pressing your garage door button. Although the screenshot above shows a 1 second interval we found setting it to 2 seconds gave a lot more reliable operation of the doors.
Safety & Security – We’ve had sensors fitted to our garage doors considering that installation that interface directly to the doors motor control unit.
These stop the doors from starting to close if there’s something in the way and if anything breaks the beam while they are descending then they’ll reverse.
This gives some peace of mind with a potentially hazardous piece of automation, you don’t want to come home and find your cat either side of your garage door!
We’ve purchased these Z-Wave garage door sensors that will supply us with status of the door position and we’ll be covering fitting them in a future post.
For now though our garage doors can be operated from our iphone using the Indigo Touch app and we have the feed from the cam inside the garage on the same screen too so we can monitor it. Being able to open the doors when you’re in view of the house when driving home, rather than having to waiting to be within RF range of the old controller is a great update.
Add to that the ability to do it from anywhere in the world with Internet access and you have an inexpensive but beneficial smart home upgrade.
Now read part 1 and part 2 of this Home Automation on the Mac series.
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Last update on 2021-10-04 / affiliate links / images from Amazon product advertising API
