Identifying a controller...

[clarity-phev]

Good Morning,

Thanks for your work on this project !

I have been running teslamate for a while and I am interested in integrating garage door functionality.
My garage door is a Liftmaster 3265 (Security+ 1.0).

I would like a solution that is completely off the cloud, and does not require another intermediate manager like HA or Homebridge. I am aware of 'ratgdo', but would also like to consider a dumb relay closure interface (perhaps with a reed switch to sense door position). Your Readme mentions support for 'generic MQTT or HTTP' controllers. There are a LOT of simple WiFi relay controllers, but they never publish protocols and they typically advertise support for Google Home, etc. which makes me think they are designed exclusively for use from the cloud.

Can you recommend any specific generic WiFi dry contact devices with known protocols that can work directly with tesla-geogdo?

I am running teslamate on a dedicated RPi4 in Docker so I presume I would add a 5th container running tesla-geogdo properly configured for whatever relay driver I decided on?

-Thanks

[brchri]

Hi @clarity-phev. My direct experience with smart GDO's is MyQ and ratgdo, as well as supporting some other users successfully with Meross (via Homebridge). I'm aware of some simple dry contact products like Shelly that I believe would work as they're controlled via simple HTTP requests, but my concern there would be your ability to get it working with the Security protocol; I believe you'd have to do something like Meross does where you connect it to a remote control or the wall switch; then the Shelly device would simulate a physical button press to those devices to control the garage. The biggest problem with such a solution is the state of the garage door wouldn't be exposed / accessible to the device (and therefore Tesla-GeoGDO).

The nice thing about ratgdo (I have no affiliation to this project so this isn't a shameless plug) is you get full control of the GDO and state information in one convenient package. It is off-cloud, and if you use the native MQTT firmware, Tesla-GeoGDO can control it "directly" (via an MQTT broker) without the need to use an intermediary like HA or Homebridge, so aside from requiring an MQTT broker (you can just use Teslamate's, so you don't need to spin up a dedicated one if you don't want to), I believe it meets all of your requirements. This is why the project has been as successful as it's been, because Chamberlain GDO's are notoriously difficult to work with due to their security protocols, and this is the only project that has really cracked the problem.

All that said, you should know that the native MQTT firmware for ratgdo has been a bit buggy in my experience. However, I know the maintainer has been actively developing and bug fixing the firmware, so I expect most of these issues should be resolved soon if not already. I personally use the ESP Home firmware as it's been less buggy, but Tesla-GeoGDO doesn't support controlling ESP Home devices directly, so you'd need the HA/HB intermediary if you wanted to do that.

In regards to how to run Tesla-GeoGDO, yes you'd add a 5th container for the app to your RPi4 (or wherever you want to run it) and just point it to the device you want to control in the config file.

Hope that's helpful.

[brchri]

I should add that I believe Meross does have an offline mode where you can communicate with it locally, but Tesla-GeoGDO doesn't support that directly either as it's a more complex protocol and I don't have a device to test with. I believe HA and HB both have support for using it in this manner, so you could go with that solution if you wished as well, but I know you don't wish for the intermediary, and it also requires the use of a dry contact remote which isn't as elegant, but works fine. I just wanted to provide you with another option.

[clarity-phev]

Thank you very much for the detailed response.

I understand the value of the GDO state information, and I would not go with a simple dry contact closure without also including a switch to ascertain the door stat too... But as you mention, this sort of kludge would lack existing support.

But, given all that I have gathered from you and elsewhere, I think 'ratgdo' seems like a very good approach and I will probably order one. I know he seems to make batches of them an sometimes availability is delayed, but I am in no hurry.

When I receive it, perhaps you could entertain a few questions as I work on deployment. I have some programming experience, but I am finding Docker to be very counter-intuitive !

[brchri]

Sure. If you're using docker compose and you use the compose example in the readme, that should get you 95% of the way there on the docker side. The only thing to contend with will be getting the config file in the right place and possibly permissions issues, but other than that you shouldn't have to do too much else with docker. After that it's just getting your config.yml file correct and you're off to the races. But yeah just let me know if you have questions or issues when you're deploying and I'll do what I can to help.