Your garage door on the network, a review of the tuxgraphics smartphone garage door opener

Craftsman just recently released their AssureLink Garage Door Openers which allow you to check and close your garage door via your smartphone. The openers themselves are fairly pricey ($289.99 if you don't want battery backup, $296.99 if you do). Internet connectivity is free the first year, but jumps to $19.99 a year thereafter. Twenty bucks a year seems a little pricey simply for the convenience of seeing if your door is open via your smartphone. If you feel it's something you need, but don't want the extra cost AND you have a little electrical know-how, the tuxgraphics smartphone garage door opener may be just the ticket for you.

At a glance
Pros

• Neat little solution
• Fairly customizable
• Inexpensive overall (42.50 EUR, or about $56)

Cons

• No DHCP option and IP address can only be changed by jumpering the board
• Requires a hobbyist electronics level of know-how to implement
• No app, access is by web page

Admittedly the tuxgraphics smartphone garage door opener was a little more involved with its implementation than I'm used to. It took several emails to Guido, the mastermind behind it all, and the help of my friend Erik Arentzen, an electrical engineer, to ultimately bring it to fruition. It isn't a piece of hardware you purchase, plug in, and go. It involves reading schematics, soldering, and just generally knowing what you are doing. That said, once you get all of that figured out, it works well.


Part of being a do-it-yourself project is you can go as simple or as complex as you want. The picture above is the example from the tuxgraphics site. I tend to over-engineer things, and my friend Erik tends to almost obsessively compulsively over-engineer things, so ours looked a bit different in the end. The tuxgraphics smartphone garage door opener kit comes with a tuxgraphics ethernet board, voltage regulator, several resistors, the door switch, and the relay for activating the door. Each of these pieces needs to be soldered in to place and configured for your unique situation. We started by Erik simply soldering the pieces in to place.


Once we had all the parts soldered in to place, we had to think about how to mount it. We could use a piece of wood and some standoffs, like in the example above, or we could find a case and seal it off a little better. We also needed to find some terminals for easy connection, so we headed to our local Radio Shack where we found everything we needed, however we decided not to use some of the parts we purchased. One of those parts being the hobby electronics case for the board, we just didn't like it. After digging around in the archives of Erik's basement, we found an old Panasonic CF-VZSU04 laptop battery that was the perfect size and shape, so we used that. In the picture below you can see how it fit beautifully.



It did require some slightly drilling, dremelling, and trimming however as a laptop battery case isn't meant to house an ethernet board. Erik went to work with the drill press and dremel and machined it to perfect spec.




Once the case was machined and the board secured to it, some simple speaker connections from Radio Shack and labels rounded out the package, making a very tight and clean enclosure.




The next step was installing this in the garage. One thing that did bug me was the lack of DHCP support. The IP address can be changed, but it requires jumpering the board and rebooting to get to the config screen. Not a huge deal as long as you don't need to change it in the future and, if you do, you remember which connections to jumper.

The tuxgraphics smartphone garage door opener relay simply connects in parallel to your existing garage door opener switch. I ran wires up to our existing switch and connected them all at the terminals there. I also had a cat5 connection readily available, so I did not need to do any wifi bridge magic. The next two pictures show how I installed it in our garage.




The only thing left at this point was to install the switch which reports on open/closed status. The example at the start of the article shows a bicycle spoke and a 2 x 4. I didn't really like that idea, mainly because of the fragility of the lower sides of the garage door with kids and such, so I chose to mount mine up high and used the normally closed position of the switch vs. the normally open position. The one drawback to this is that any position unswitched will report the garage door as closed on the tuxgraphics smartphone garage door opener web server, even if it's only partially closed. That was a trade-off I was willing to take for the cleaner install and not a problem if installed the way tuxgraphics recommends.




Once on your network, the tuxgraphics smartphone garage door opener is fast and up to 4 doors are supported. The web page is simple, but adequate. Garage door states are shown as |=| and |.| vs |Closed| and |Open|, which is ok, I just wonder why. Garage door open and closing history is kept on one tab, whereas another tab allows you to do passcode free (per device) functioning of the door. There is no specific app for the tuxgraphics smartphone garage door opener, which may have been nice, but I simply set up a bookmark to the webpage on my phone and then set up keyfree access for that device, my phone is security enabled. On the router side I opened a non-specific port to my hostname, then had that port forward to the garage door opener. Overall it's a cool little device and I can't see the Craftsman AssureLink being better executed, except for having a specific app.





Anytime I review a device I have to look past the "this is cool" factor and take an objective look at the usefulness of the device. My wife laughs at the smartphone garage door opener, but then again it's almost a standing joke when I connect yet another thing to the network. Many times she ends up finding them useful despite her first impressions, I can say already that the garage door history function is very nice. A garage door opener in the car is always going to be faster and less distracting, but I can also close the door from work, or let someone in to our house if needed. When I reflect on the tuxgraphics device, my awe isn't necessarily the smartphone garage door opener, but essentially the multitude of different uses Guido has come up with for this inexpensive little board used for the smartphone project. All of the uses require home electronic hobbyist know-how, but there are some very useful functions such as an Ethernet host watchdog, remote flower watering and monitoring, a home temp and humidity monitor, ethernet based weather station, and MUCH more. Basically about anything you can think of that would be nice to have network enabled, you might be able to find it at tuxgraphics, you just have to know how to solder and read schematics.