I bought a house on October 9, 2020. This house has a garage door, and like any normal person of course I had to automate it.

One of the first things I did when I moved into my house was research some automation. I initially bought a half dozen ESP8266 devices and tried to figure out what I could do with them. I found Home Assistant and set that up on my server computer, along with ZoneMinder for security cameras.

I knew I would need some sort of relay (domain purchased from is gone) and reed switches to trigger the door and sense its position, so I purchased some from the internet. But my friend Paul said all I needed was a MOSFET so I bought one of those too. I tried to figure out how to trigger the door with a mosfet, but I was never able to. I won't document those failures.

Home Assistant has a plugin called ESPHome where you can write yaml files to configure an esp8266 module. This then builds a binary which you need to flash onto the esp8266 at least once via usb. From then on you can then on you can upload from a web form and drop the bin file in manually, or just press the UPLOAD button from ESPHome. I set my relay up on pin 19/D1 for the digital pin, and 16/GND,10/3v3 for the power. The Reed switch I tossed on 15/D7 and 11/GND but that could have been anywhere. See Schematic below. It still doesn't have an enclosure.

With the relay triggering, I still had one problem - I'd trigger the door and it wouldn't do anything! Something else was a problem. The wiring for the garage door terminates in four screws, two of which are the door trigger. I tried poking it with a multimeter and having someone push the door button on the wall, but I was never successful that way, as any contact between the two poles would just open the door anyway.

After some unsuccessful thinking, I figured it was time to purchase an oscilloscope. I've always wanted one, in fact I bought an old Heathkit one once, but never got it working as I would have had to replace all the capacitors …

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