A few weeks back I came home from a class up north and Agent Smith informed me that the right side garage door was “busted.” I said ok and the next day started looking for someone to assist us. Not having any network options to work, I hit up Yelp and found Five Star Garage Door Service. They were more than happy to send a guy that very morning.
The tech arrived and within one minute diagnosed the problem: it seems someone had hit one of the door’s bottom sensors and knocked it out of alignment. (When this was reported back to Agent Smith, he facepalmed.) Not one to want to waste someone’s time, I had the tech do a service on all three doors to make sure they stay in working order, and then talked to him about automation options. It turns out that our openers could be upgraded to provide some basic automation and reporting, so the tech gave me a quote for the work, and later that week he came back to do the install. This meant just about every thing with wheels had to come out of the garage (although I used it has an opportunity to wash the rather filthy Carrera).
The new controls were originally installed by the tech right onto one of the side beams. You can see the new controllers in the second pic: they’re the black boxes in the upper right and one of the old controllers is in the lower left of the pic. Agent Smith didn’t like the location of the new controls nor the hardware used for their mountings, so he eventually moved them onto a piece of rail he installed (third pic). Still we’re quite happy with the changes, as now we get alerts if a door is left open for too long and we can operate the doors from our phones or computer. As a bonus, the tech also programmed the F150 and Carrera to open the garage doors as well.
Next up will be upgrading the head unit on the front gate…