Garage Door - Hacked

[BraveSirRobbin]

Yes, the garage door is one of the most problematic items a household tries to manage with their automation/security system.  Just do a search on "garage door" and you will net hundreds of threads on this topic!
 
I do like the deadbolt option and the automatic inclusion of this feature in some of the garage door types listed here!
 
Many thefts in our area involved entry via the garage door.

 

[drvnbysound]

Yeah, I certainly understand that if someone is specifically targeting me and/or my home, I'm not going to prevent them from getting in. My thought/intent was to prevent against the rouge teenager who finds out how to do something like this and just wants to break in and steal or damage things just because they can.

In our county (although not yet in my community or neighborhood), I've heard of a number of homes that have been broken into in the past 6-8 months. Many times nothing is stolen, but probably about 80%+ of breakable things are broken. This has been including punching holes in drywall with a hammer... again, just because they want to and can.

 

[apostolakisl]

Incorporating an automatic dead bolt with an automatic opener seems like it would be slightly tricky.
 
I would expect you would need a touch of a delay between the dead bolt powering open and the overhead starting to go up.  If not, the overhead door might bind up on the dead bolt preventing it from pulling out.
 
Maybe not though.  My garage door sort of closes slightly passed closed, if that makes sense.  It ends up bowing the traveler track ever so slightly upward.  When you go to open the door, the track has to first "unbow" then the door starts pulling up, probably not before it bows the track ever so slightly in the down direction.  Perhaps the delay provided by this gives a fast acting solenoid time to get the pin out prior to it binding.
 
If indeed the binding isn't an issue, then I suspect you can have the solenoid powered by stealing a little juice off of the motor.  Whenever the motor is on, the solenoid retracts, otherwise it is engaged.  In a power failure you would need to manually push the solenoid back.

 

[newalarm]

Don't they sell a kit for installing electric deadbolts on garage doors? I was in South America recently and there they have steel doors, heavy gauge. I noticed the electric deadbolts and thought it was pretty cool.

 

[BraveSirRobbin]

I was thinking of the roll your own variety and yes, you would most likely have to establish a delay between your solenoid and garage door motor's activation.  If I were going to do this, I would probably do this with something like THIS, and maybe even a hardware delay (in lieu of using the Ocelot) using THIS.  I would also have to replace the existing button on my garage wall near the laundry room door so it could trigger this setup as well.  Probably the easiest way to do this would be to hack one of the rolling code remotes.
 
Also, would be nice if the solenoid would NOT require power in its 'lock' position, and have a manual over ride of some sort, again would have to investigate.
 
Of course, many ways to do this (I only thought about this for ten minutes).

 

[apostolakisl]

I was thinking of the roll your own variety and yes, you would most likely have to establish a delay between your solenoid and garage door motor's activation.  If I were going to do this, I would probably do this with something like THIS, and maybe even a hardware delay (in lieu of using the Ocelot) using THIS.  I would also have to replace the existing button on my garage wall near the laundry room door so it could trigger this setup as well.  Probably the easiest way to do this would be to hack one of the rolling code remotes.
 
Also, would be nice if the solenoid would NOT require power in its 'lock' position, and have a manual over ride of some sort, again would have to investigate.
 
Of course, many ways to do this (I only thought about this for ten minutes).

The logical delay would be pretty easily implemented with a Webcontrol board.  You would still need a relay to turn the solenoid on.  I was thinking that you would use the spring in the solenoid to lock, and power the solenoid to unlock.  The solenoid would only need to be retracted during motion of the door.
 
I have several radio control boards similar the one you show.  The only trouble with them is if you send a held RF, it jambs anything else on that frequency. . . like your garage door opener or your car's keyfob.  So you would need to look at what bands all your stuff is working on.  You can also use them in interlock or toggle mode to avoid the continuous RF.  Toggle trouble is if it misses, it then is out of whack indefinitely.  Interlock mode is what I tend to use since it will self-correct any mix-up at the next command.  However, then you generally are forced to have one of the outputs serve as nothing but the "off" setting.

 

[pete_c]

I recall that my last three garage doors installed from scratch were a bit different.  All of them were installed without GDO's.  The first one had a lockable exterior "handle" with a mechanism inside which slide a metal bar into the side tracks of the garage door.  Second had a similiar setup although it appeared to be installed without an exterior lockable handle.  Third one had no locking mechanism at all.
 
Not knowing where the sliding bar was located from the outside would make it difficult to circumvent the locking mechanism.
 
Relating to automation of the garage door opener and security I have over the years done differently with the different garage doors.
 
With the current garage door I left the "installed" garage door sensors et al and installed additional sensors and stuff relating to the alarm panel. 
 
That and a couple of years ago added PIRs and an IP camera inside of the garage (so I could watch if I had a problem).
 
That said though a few years back in the house previous to current home and with a detached garage when automating security stuff; my seemingly ideal logic didn't include everything although I had thought that it did.
 
It caused some very low WAF.
 
It was really just a bunch of "if that do this" or "if that do that" type stuff relating to just the garage door and alarm system.
 
One day my wife pulled into the garage with the car running while on a conference call.  The alarm security events did start to trigger; that said she left the car running and continued with her conference call as the garage door started to shut.  That was a damper on my home automation endeavor for a while and lead to some lively dinner conversations relating to why I "needed" to automate  versus just manually pushing buttons etc.

 

[gatchel]

Here's a cache link to getchel's article until the portal data tranfer catches up:
http://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=cocoontech+41A6102&d=4626702868021436&mkt=en-US&setlang=en-US&w=bm6m3VY73s83-xGTvCPxxUWb8KaQhFq6

Just to reiterate in case it wasn't clear in the original write up, that door being locked did not have a GDO attached. It was simply a way to lock/unlock a garage using HA. There could be a way with a GDO involved but it would require some engineereig, one or two more relays and an input or two.

 

[rsw686]

I was thinking of the roll your own variety and yes, you would most likely have to establish a delay between your solenoid and garage door motor's activation.  If I were going to do this, I would probably do this with something like THIS, and maybe even a hardware delay (in lieu of using the Ocelot) using THIS.  I would also have to replace the existing button on my garage wall near the laundry room door so it could trigger this setup as well.  Probably the easiest way to do this would be to hack one of the rolling code remotes.
 
Also, would be nice if the solenoid would NOT require power in its 'lock' position, and have a manual over ride of some sort, again would have to investigate.
 
Of course, many ways to do this (I only thought about this for ten minutes).

 
The quick and dirty hack way would be to do like this guy did. Of course this wouldn't work if your garage door opener has a backup battery.
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9hSp2FClIA

 

[newalarm]

You also negate the pull cord (emergency release) mechanism with all this. Could be liability issue or cause other problems? Probably why most manufacturers don't provide dead bolts?

 

[apostolakisl]

You also negate the pull cord (emergency release) mechanism with all this. Could be liability issue or cause other problems? Probably why most manufacturers don't provide dead bolts?

As long as you can manually override it.  My garage doors all came with dead bolts, they just aren't automated.  It wouldn't be any different than the emergency release cord you refer to as far as manual override, just means you have to override 2 things instead of 1.
 
And if you look at that video above, you can see he also has a manual deadbolt on the door.  It's on the left side a couple feet below his solenoid.  You can see it pass by at the 1:54 mark.

 

[newalarm]

right. but you could also provide an emergency exit button that would release deadbolts. Life safety is tricky. Things are done but we don't always know why they are done, until something happens.
 
When you live by yourself, it is easy. You know how it's all set up. but when you add in wife, kids, guests, it adds major complication of different scenarios and having to explain how it all works when you are absent.
 
I think cameras are going to be the way to go for us...