Opening a Garage Door using a Shelly Relay

IoT
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Opening a Garage Door from a Phone using a Shelly relay

The goal of this project is to be able to open a garage door from a phone. I had a Shelly 1 PM on hand, so figured on using that. However, I soon learned that the relay in this device is hard-wired to the line voltage – probably something to do with the current measurement circuitry in it. However, it was a fairly simple matter to add a RIB relay to provide the isolated relay. I built the entire setup into a cheap plastic electrical box, and then installed near the garage door opener:

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The output of the relay is wired in parallel with the wall switch for the opener.

A timer was enabled in the device settings that turned off the relay 1s after it is engaged – this allows the device to send a pulse to the opener each time the relay is engaged.

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Now, using the Shelly cloud app, the door can be opened – even remotely.

Using a Shelly Plus 1, this would be a very simple project, as the RIB relay would not be required.

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how does it communicate to home gateway ? I guess wifi

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Yes, WiFi – range seems quite good on these small devices. The Shelly devices technically don’t need a gateway – they can communicate directly with each other, or directly to the Shelly cloud. However, I would like to get away from the Shelly cloud and use Home Assistant and eventually Simple IoT.

As far as the protocol – I think they are using Http/REST to do everything (even though the devices support MQTT), but I don’t know for sure. They must maintain some type of persistent connection to the cloud, as commands sent from the cloud take effect immediately. Same with Home Assistant – change something in Home Assistant, and the device changes immediately – should sniff the network and see what is going on …