Insteon Garage Door Control?

[Captain Caveman]

Can a garage door be remotely controlled using an Insteon switch?

 

[upstatemike]

Not directly. You can have an Insteon keypad button trigger an event in your home automation system which in turn activates a relay across the garage door button. Would that do what you want?

 

[BraveSirRobbin]

Good suggestion that Mike gave above. HERE is a How-To which shows how you can do this without running any wiring from your wiring closet!

If you have an Elk or Ocelot with Relay Output capability you can use those contact closure outputs directly. For Insteon you can use an appliance module and have it close a relay with 120 VAC coil (I'm hoping Insteon makes an appliance module).

Be aware you should drive this with a logic controller or software of some sort so you can program momentary closure (i.e. on for just a second or so).

If you need more details, let us know!

 

[Captain Caveman]

Be aware you should drive this with a logic controller or software of some sort so you can program momentary closure (i.e. on for just a second or so.

I want to be able to control the door without wiring to the output on the ELK as that would require ripping out walls.

The key that I was looking for is BSR's comment on turning on the relay switch for only a second or so.

What would happen if the controller fails to communicate to turn off the relay switch? Could that damage the garage door motor?

 

[BLH]

Yes there are two Appliance Type Insteon Modules.
2456S3 ApplianceLinc v2 3 pin and less expensive Icon 2856S3B On/Off Module.
Icons are not as fancy feature wise and will take a single X10 Primary Address and No X10 scenes. Icon has a shorter warantee; no pass through outlet and a green LED over the Insteon Bright White LED, but if my math is correct is $10 less.
If you are using Insteon Address both would due.

Note with a relay. Both versions have a Local Sensing Circuit and can be programed to ignore the local control, but even disabled have the sensing current there. Some 120 Volt Relays maybe held closed or chatter when off by that current.

 

[BraveSirRobbin]

I want to be able to control the door without wiring to the output on the ELK as that would require ripping out walls.

Re-read my second sentence in my first post.

 

[upstatemike]

Maybe have the appliance module turn on a 12V wall wart then have that power an Elk timing relay set as a 1-shot with 1 second of closure time. Even if the appliance module gets stuck ON the Elk relay will only let the contacts remain closed for the 1 second cycle.

 

[Captain Caveman]

BSR , I'm sure that works great, but I was looking more for a commercial solution that works out of the box.

Hopefully, Smarthomes will address a need for this quickly.

Thanks for the suggestions.

 

[BraveSirRobbin]

BSR , I'm sure that works great, but I was looking more for a commercial solution that works out of the box.

Hey, that's not a problem. I just wanted to show you an alternative solution. I doubt that Insteon will be providing "contact closure" modules in the near future though.

After re-reading your post I noticed this comment that you made:

The key that I was looking for is BSR's comment on turning on the relay switch for only a second or so.

What would happen if the controller fails to communicate to turn off the relay switch? Could that damage the garage door motor?

One soluton that you could do is use an Elk 960 Timer Relay for the contact closure. This unit has an on-board relay that will activate (i.e. close its contacts) for a time that you specify by turning an adjustable knob).

This Elk-960 unit can trigger on a voltage level or contact closure also so you could have an Insteon appliance module with a wall wart (any DC voltage from five volts to 24 volts) so when the appliance module turned on, it would trigger the Elk timer relay. So you could set this relay so it was on for only a couple of seconds, then it would turn off and would not trigger again until it saw another DC input from the wall wart.

So you could have the Insteon appliance module on for say four seconds and turn off and the Elk 960 relay on for two seconds and turn off. This way you can make certain that the contacts to the opener were indeed off after two seconds even if the Insteon appliance module did not turn off (i.e. in case the Insteon "off" signal did not make it to the module).

One disadvantage to this solution is the Elk 960 itself requires a DC voltage (12 to 24 volts) to operate. Here again you could use another wall wart for this purpose.

Again, just some suggestions for thought as I seriously doubt you will find an "off the shelf" solution.

If you want to consider this solution, let me know and I can mock it up for you here (have to use an X-10 appliance module though) to make sure my methodology works.

Regards,

BSR

 

[BraveSirRobbin]

Ok, so I couldn't resist and tried this anyway just to see how it worked out. It did exactly as I proposed above. The only problem was that if the appliance module was turned off before the time out of the Elk-960, you had to wait until the Elk-960 time was finished before the contacts would open. This isn't bad, but you still have the one failure point.

Well, since I already had it hooked up I tried powering the Elk-960 off of the "switched" wall wart from the X-10 appliance module (see pic below).

So now only one DC supply (the wall wart) is being used to both supply power to the Elk-960 AND act as the trigger source for it. I was thinking this might not work because I was worried the Elk-960 would not get power in time to provide reliable logic (i.e. work right) since it was being powered on at the same time it was being triggered.

So now when the appliance module was triggered, it provided power and a trigger source to the Ekk-960. If the appliance module was left on the Elk-960 would time out (I set it to five seconds for this test) and reset its relay to off. Now I tried to turn the appliance module on and then turned it off in a second. Now the Elk-960 would also turn off (i.e. follow the appliance module) and not have to wait for it to time out (five seconds) since it now did not have power.

This is cool because now you only need one wall wart (on the appliance module only). I used a 12 volt one I had laying around (this one had 200 milliamp capability).

I did have to place a 500 ohm resistor between the trigger source and ground though as a residual 12 volts would exist when the appliance module was turned off (needed a resistor to quickly bleed off the DC voltage when turned off).

Anyway, this works out great and can be used where one would worry if an OFF signal ever made it to an appliance module.

 

[BraveSirRobbin]

In case anyone wanted to try this here is the schematic with the correct jumper settings for the Elk 960.

 

[Captain Caveman]

UpstateMike, I did not understand your solution until BSR diagramed it.

SirRobin, I applaud your tenacity for all things automated.

This is a great solution, now only if I can attractively package it into one plastic housing I could sell it and give you guys the royalties that you deserve!