Installing OpenGarage for use with Home Assistant
After the dissapointment that was Chamberlain preventing third-party api access to MyQ, I looked for alternatives. I wanted to control my garage door from Home Assistant and came across OpenGarage. It is a little more expensive than some of the other options but it ticked off all of my boxes. Plus one I didn't know was an option!
- Open source. I was done with dealing with companies deciding what I could do with something I paid for.
- Local only. I didn't want or need a cloud solution. Tailscale is my remote access solution. OpenGarage does have cloud functionality but it's optional.
- Has a built-in Home Assistant integration. While I was ok with some additional effort like using HACS, I preferred a more plug n play approach.
- Well packaged hardware. This the one area that OpenGarage falls short. It's perfectly fine but won't win any awards.
The extra feature is vehicle presence detection. I am excited about using this in the future. I think this will make some of my Tesla api calls more streamlined. I've found it difficult to determine if the car is at home. The primary method of detecting the state of the garage door is with an ultrasonic sensor. this also allows it to detect if a vehicle is present.
One thing that I underestimated is how it handles Security+ 2.0. I was good with their approach and felt it would work out fine. This turned out to be more complicated.