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Their API breaking is nothing new. I ditched it years ago since it stopped working every couple of months.
Of course an official announcement is more serious, but still.
As someone who maintained an API, 80% to 90% of my time was discovering that hackers were attempting an exploit, blocking it, adding monitoring, building abuse prevention. After we shut our API off, we could turn services back on, especially free services that we only took away because hackers.
Not to mention the support volume. More than half of our support calls were, “Why did you suspend my account? I’m a poor old grandpa. I want to appeal.” Okay, yep we looked into activity and you sent 50000 requests in less than a minute and that’s all you ever did with this account. Did you know hackers lie and will spend hours getting tech support? You go to school to be an engineer to build cool stuff and instead field bullshit support requests all day from people trying to destroy the thing you want to build so they can maybe make thirty bucks and cost you tens of thousands. It sucked the life out of me and turned me eternally cynical.
Never trust cloud solutions when it isn’t your cloud.
Anyone have good suggestions on what deserves my money, or the effort of setting up?
I got two ratgdo modules in the mail yesterday. Hooked ‘em up last night and it was super straightforward. I disabled the built-in WiFi on the MyQ openers and they’ve been working excellently last night and today. No regrets!
Anything new I buy has the ability to directly talk to homeassistant without a third party. Zigbee, zwave, ip. If its cloud it can fuck right off, I don’t need it.
Many brand names are using these protocols to talk to their bullshit hubs that then send your data out of your network. I’ve got a hodgepodge of stuff like samsung sensors, Ikea switches, ip cameras and all kinds of stuff.
It isn’t even that hard to set them up. HA can detect most devices on the network and recognise them.
Why does one need to connect everything like this? The only connected system (besides computers/entertainment ) I have in my entire house is a security system. What benefit is there to all that other stuff? Doesn’t it add quite a bit of cost?
More cost upfront, but as we’ve seen time and time against companies will start charging subscriptions for thing they previously didn’t.
Then there’d the privacy benefits. Not needing to rely on some company to keep servers alive. Being able to more easily troubleshoot/upgrade/swap individual parts. Not having to use a different app for basically every single device. All that sort of stuff
You can definitely have all the gear and not need it. I’ve set mine up a little at a time to do specific tasks. Some examples:
Alert me if my side gate is unlocked at night, because that is the access to my business.
Check if there is water in the chicken house reservoir, as that means the chickens have dropped a pebble in the valve again.
Most security systems these days are just whitelabeled zwave etc sensors with a proprietary hub and a monthly charge.
The nice thing about HA is that you can pull almost everything into it and then add whatever automations you want. Recent example was my SO complaining about how dark it was going to the car when they leave in the morning. Super easy to set up an automation that turns out the floodlight switches when the front door opens. All kinds of stuff like that that’s really useful.
I only tend to dabble, but I have Home Assistant set up - one example I’m on a flexible electricity tariff which is based on wholesale prices. It chages every 30 minutes. I have an automation that grabs tarrif info. If the price goes below zero (which it does sometimes when the grid has more energy than it knows what to do with, my hot water heaters all automatically turn on.
I used a Shelly 1 pulled into home assistant. Works perfectly. Very simple for opening and closing. I am building an ultrasonic sensor using esphome that I’ll use to know how far the door is open. Currently I just use Zigbee contact sensors. Open or closed.
Garages just need a momentary dry-contact switch wired up where the button is (or you can get a ladder and place it closer to the motor).
I use a Sonoff 4CH Pro which could do up to 4 garage doors. Surely there are other dry contact options, but that’s the one I use.
It’s flashed with Tasmota, and each switch is set to stay on for a fraction of a second, like a button press.
For sensors I use z-wave door sensors. The magnet is taped to the door, and the sensor is installed above it. I copied and pasted some yaml from somewhere to make Home Assistant display everything properly. It’s pretty slick!
This is in my covers.yaml file (referenced from config.yaml, of course).
garage_1: friendly_name: Garage 1 device_class: garage value_template: "{{ is_state('binary_sensor.garage_1', 'on') }}" open_cover: - condition: state entity_id: binary_sensor.garage_1 state: "off" - service: switch.turn_on target: entity_id: switch.garage_1_toggle close_cover: - condition: state entity_id: binary_sensor.garage_1 state: "on" - service: switch.turn_on target: entity_id: switch.garage_1_toggle stop_cover: service: switch.turn_on target: entity_id: switch.garage_1_toggle icon_template: >- {% if is_state('binary_sensor.garage_1', 'on') %} mdi:garage-open {% else %} mdi:garage {% endif %}
Here is Home Assistant’s Blog Post on the subject.
Yep. Fuck MyQ. I ordered a $15 smart garage adapter and will solder the contacts at the wall button.
I bought gocontrol units for my dumb garage door openers and had to build a relay system to get it to work with the intelligence wall plates as they were not just shorting out to trigger the door.
But it should work with any new non smart opener if I wanna stay away from proprietary crap
I have an intelligent 2.0 door, but I noticed that the mechanical switch on the wall controller is a simple contact switch on the PCB. The 12v “smart” wire cames out of the PCB to the motor. So I.a solder two wired out of that switch and it should work.
Here is the pic of the wall switch PCB.
Ya I wired the relay to that button on my wall unit to trigger the door since the signal wire between it and the motor wasn’t just a contact switch triggering it.
I switched to open garage a few weeks ago and its so much better
This decision was made so that we can continue to provide the best possible experience
The best possibile experience is having a single app that can do the whole house, not a broken proprietary app that occupies 200 mb of space on the phone and that takes 5 seconds to start because of its fancy splash screen
Don’t understand this, they are actively kicking out customers
They’re not talking about your experience. They’re talking about the experience at the CEO’s summer house… That tennis court will not build itself and not for free 😁
Ah yes best possibile experience is this: (from the ars Technica article about it)
“Sadly, this app now displays advertisement at the very top and I cannot find a way to disable it,” writes one Play Store reviewer (Google doesn’t provide links to reviews). “This is very disturbing and on top of it, it moves my garage opening button out of the visible part of the screen. So to use it I now have to first look at the ads, then scroll down and hope to find my button.”
This is what it looks like now. The ad always occupies that space at the top
Ahhh, subscription for being integrated in a car. While instead with home assistant you could just say hey [assistant] open the door
Too bad they have a monopoly in the NA market
My previous house was smart down to nearly every light being RGB Hue. For movie nights it kicked ass to be able to sync the lights in my living room / kitchen to the movie.
The challenge in IoT is the “I”. Many companies make cheap products that REQUIRE internet to work and are not going to work longer than a decade in most cases.
When I was designing that house I had made it a point to not purchase any device that was not Zigbee, Z-Wave or Natively compatible with HomeKit which led to a very robust setup that would continue to function even when the internet was down.
If you are dabbling I recommend making the same decision even if you plan to use GoogleHome or Alexa. The HomeKit compatible things usually cost more for a reason.
The only devices I have that are on Wi-Fi are ones I got before learning about HA. Zigbee FTW 👍
I’m saving this comment.
This is why I hate depending on cloud services for my home automation. The last one on my shitlist is my thermostat. Just haven’t gotten around to researching options yet.
Put some
windextasmota on itYeah, not this thermostat.
Bloody proprietary shit that, fortunately, another fella managed to write a reasonably well-featured HA add-on for. But it still goes via their cloud service, and the problem is it uses a proprietary protocol over 2 or 3 pair wire,. Additionally the evaporative A/C plugs directly into the heater unit, which handles C&C for both appliances.
I haven’t ruled out having to separate the buggers out and control each individually. As long as I can find a thermostat that can handle them.
Funny story… I switched to Home assistant from custom software I wrote when I realized I was reverse engineering the MyQ API for the 5th time and really didn’t feel like doing it a 6th. Just ordered some ratdgos.
I’d never heard of ratgdo before, pretty interesting setup. I have two gocontrol units I had to modify to work with my non door bell type wall units. I had to put a relay between the gocontrol and my opener button on the wall unit because it wouldn’t trigger the doors. The ratgdo would up my game with light control.
We inherited a MyQ opener when we moved, and I’ve never been very happy with it aside if these issues.
Has anyone already done the research into a smart opener that doesn’t suck and allows local control via home assistant, preferably over zwave?
I’m going to do a bit of research on it myself, just wondering if anyone has a recommendation to point me in the right direction.
I don’t have wifi in my garage, and I’d rather not rely on wifi to control the door.
To be fair, mechanically, the opener we have is fine, it’s everything else about it that I generally hate.
I use this: https://www.thesmartesthouse.com/products/diy-smart-garage-opener-kit-zooz-multirelay-ecolink-tilt-sensor
It’s a bit finicky. If I open the door through home assistant, it prevents me from operating the door through the manual opener until I click twice. Otherwise, local opener has no power. Not sure if I installed it incorrectly.
But it works fine, otherwise.
I don’t know if my opener has the dry contacts required to make a solution like this work. I’m not keen on hacking the remote or anything. I might have to replace the opener before I have the right contacts to use something like this… which might be the plan, I’m going to take a close look at the specific unit I have and find the model and manual tomorrow, and see what’s in the manual before I do anything more…
Well I guess that explains why mine stopped working. I’d have never bought one if it didn’t come with my house.
Well, I swapped over to ratgdo instead of API access a couple months back, seems I pulled that trigger at the perfect time.
Fuck them though. It costs them the same whether you’re using the mobile app, or direct API calls, in fact it likely costs less. They are literally just after money.
I bought 2 of them, on backorder, a few weeks back after the HomeAssistant integration broke yet again. I can’t wait to get them in and get them installed so I can get my automatons working again.
Also, they are shutting down the public API from my understanding, not the ones that are sold by 3rd parties like Honda and Tesla that will still continue to work to open/close the door. So, they are pretty much going full reddit at this point.
Dude the swap is amazing. No more beeping and flashing, precise opening/closing percentages, no lag time with api communication, or downtime when the myQ servers go down. It is such an amazing improvement. Night and day to even the official app, even if you wanted to just replicate what it already does.
The one thing I wish I could do however, is access my camera from home assistant. I didn’t realize it was so locked down when I made my initial purchase, I just thought it would be similar to my ring doorbell. (Another piece of tech I’m planning on replacing, actually.)
