Ahead of myself…

I tried to resist getting ahead of myself – but I just couldn’t.   My secret goal (secret because I didn’t want to tell you about if I couldn’t get it done) for this month was to start work on a remote garage door controller.   After I started playing around with the nodemcu board I was blown away with how quickly I could prototype things.  In fact, I had a working prototype the same night I started!  That was a few nights ago and since then I’ve worked to overcome a few challenges and finally have a complete working prototype.

Does the code suck?  Yes.  It totally sucks.  The creation of hours of modifying prototype after prototype I recently noticed that I didn’t even update the variable names to make sense.  All the same here it is.  THIS IS NOT ALL MY CODE.  I wish I would have wrote down all the places I copied it from by I didn’t.  Its hacked together from some awesome examples I found of other peoples work.

What does it do right now?  Well – it allows a user to open up to two garage doors and also see their status.  To check the status of the door I used reed switches…

Sort of hard to see in this picture but the magnetic piece if mounted on the door and the wired switch is on the wall.  When the door is closed, the magnet comes in contact with the switch and closes it.  Then from the app you can trigger the doors and see the status…

Lots of work to do here too.  As of right now I have a board out in the garage hooked up and Im seeing if it will keep running for a prolonged period of time.  I’ve heard some things about the ESP8266’s locking up after prolonged periods of time so I thought I’d just hook it up and see.  Im in the middle of building a second board to continue development on and I think the hardware is pretty well good to go so I might look at soldering the components to an actual board soon.  Im just waiting on some parts to come in for that to start.  In the mean time, Im going to keep hacking away on the code.  I’ll also try and get caught up with the components I’ve used in individual posts so you can see all the components I used to make this project.

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