this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2023
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Home Automation

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Home automation is the residential extension of building automation.

It is automation of the home, housework or household activity.

Home automation may include centralized control of lighting, HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning), appliances, security locks of gates and doors and other systems, to provide improved convenience, comfort, energy efficiency and security.

Warning: Working with electricity can result in injury, property damage, or even death if it is not done properly. Please keep this in mind while assisting others. If you are not sure about what you are doing, hire a licensed professional.

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Thinking about replacing my two openers and want to tie those into my HomeKit world. With the recent news from Chamberlain, I'm looking for suggestions about other brands. Looks to me like the Meross WiFi opener and a not-smart opener might be the way to go (or just ignore the smart part since they all seem to be proprietary). I looked at Genie openers

Any suggestions?

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[–] LHuisingh@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

Lol at the TailWind product. That unit can handle up to three openers and is very interoperable.

[–] M_Six2001@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

Any chance of being able to hard wire a controller into your network? If so, I highly recommend the iSmartgate Lite. It has a USB port, so you can add one of their USB to Ethernet adapters to hard wire it. I could never get a Meross opener I had to work consistently on wifi, so I went with the iSmartgate Lite and hard wired it. It's been more than a year now and it has never failed me.

OTOH, if you only have wifi available, you can get the iSmartgate Pro that uses wifi and has a few other cool bells and whistles. It will work for multiple doors. If you go with the Lite version, you'll need one controller for each door.

As for the opener itself, if you can get the door to open by shorting across the two connections from a wired switch, then pretty much any smart controller will work with it.

[–] mattfam0914@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I went with Meross and integrated into Home Assistant. It was a super easy install.

[–] xxxbewrightxxx@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

Question, does the Meross require cloud access for any of its functions? Was reading their site, and that wasn't clear to me.

[–] Old-Line2445@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago
[–] Budget-Scar-2623@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

You can get Zigbee enabled relays for fairly cheap, if you have a network to connect it to. Otherwise if you know what you’re doing (and want to put the time into it) a raspberry pi pico/esp32 and a single channel relay will do what you want for under $30 (not including cost of hardware for a Home Assistant machine if you don’t have one). And you won’t have a proprietary thing to worry about.

[–] grundelcheese@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

Do not buy a genie opener. Not only are they a garbage opener but the smart connect, Aladdin, is impossible to connect to 5-6hz routers. It is also very finicky when shutting of those bands to connect to the 2.4. 0/10 would not recommend