Q:
I’m a bit new to home automation and looking at a BLE solution for opening my garage door via home automation. Point I want to automatically open the garage door when my specific car with BLE beacon gets within x feet from garage. I have been looking at several of your beacons and wonder what you recommend. Ideally I would like to open the door as I get closer meaning down the street from the house not limited to just in front of the door (distance). Not sure if that means moving to a PHY device or not. Probably. If so, I may need a compatible scanner.
Would you help me with a suggested “kit” if needed? Kit = transponder/beacon and scanner. You may not have a specific kit. My point is if I need a compatible beacon and receiver I would like your help.
A:
We have an example of exactly that type of system on our website. I have it running at my house also and am amazed and pleased with myself 2-3 times per day when it does its magic! 🙂
This type of system will require beacons (easy to get), a BLE scanner (also easy to get), and also a “brain” (not easy to get or to setup). The beacons broadcast, the scanner sees those broadcasts and collects the live data (beacon ID and signal strength from each beacon), then the scanners sends that data to the “brain” for it to decide what to do or not to do. So the brain is the really key part here. Basically, the brain is some sort of tiny computer running code constantly with a program to trigger actions under certain circumstances.
Not sure if that makes it more clear or less.
In the case of our website example, the brain is a system called Home Automation (or HA for short). We have no affiliation with HA. It is a separate organization made of members and users who contribute changes to this open software system. HA software runs on various types of hardware; in my case, I am using a cheap hardware called rPi (or RasberryPi); basically it is a mini computer that I paid about $100 for. The size is about 3 x 2 x 1″. You can order these somewhere on the internet from various sources.
So, long story short, you need a brain for your system. I would suggest HA. The initial cost of setting up HA is around $100 for the hardware (HA software is free). But the learning curve is very steep. There are loads of documentation pages and how-to’s, but they are written by coding-savvy people and definitely not easy to understand at first. The good news is that once you have HA setup, you can use it for your garage beacon/scanner project, but you can also use it for many, many other interesting projects around your house. The list is very long. They also have an active user forum that will help answer questions that you may have.
So, here’s the link for our garage project example: https://bluecharmbeacons.com/beacon-powered-garage-door-opener/
And you can learn more about HA from this link: https://www.home-assistant.io/
