The garage often gets overlooked in the world of smart homes. After all, it’s not a space we typically spend a lot of time in. But with a few upgrades, you can transform your overhead garage door into a high-tech asset for both convenience and security.
For many homeowners, the garage is just a place to park the car, store tools, locate an extra freezer, and stash away seasonal items. Unfortunately, when connected directly to a home, it’s also an often-overlooked entry point for burglars. Even if you have a home security system, the overhead garage door is usually left out of the equation, meaning it won’t trigger the alarm when you open it to drive your car into the garage. This creates a potential vulnerability because overhead garage doors are surprisingly easy to break into. Don’t believe it? This YouTube video, which has been viewed nearly a million times, demonstrates how quickly thieves can access your garage.
Many homeowners also neglect to lock the door between the garage and their house, thinking the garage itself is secure. But, once thieves are inside a garage, they can simply close the overhead garage door and take all the time they need to break into a home, hidden from view of neighbors and passing police patrols.
Securing Your Garage
The good news is that there are a number of ways to make your garage both safer and more convenient. Here are a few simple steps:
- Lock the Door Between the Garage and the House: Install a smart lock to make it harder for intruders to break in while still providing easy, keyless access for your family.
- Alarm the Door Between the Garage and the House: Integrate the door between your garage and your house with your security system so if someone does break in through that door the security system is triggered.
- Upgrade to a Smart Overhead Garage Door: A smart controller for your overhead garage door can make a big difference. Not only will it improve security, but it also eliminates the possibility of leaving the door open by mistake.
- Integrate: Integrate your smart overhead garage door with an overall smart home so the smart home processor / hub can further automate the operation of the door.
Integration Challenges
The interface between a motorized overhead garage door opener and the wall mounted button that allows homeowners to open / close their overhead garage doors used to be very basic. It was just 2 wires that were shorted when the button was pressed. This allowed an overhead garage door to easily be integrated with a smart home processor / hub by connecting a smart relay to these wires. A sensor on the overhead garage door would provide feedback as to whether the door was open or closed.
In recent years this has all changed. Today, most overhead garage door openers have a colored learn button and the wires between the wall mounted button and the opener carry encoded messages. So, integrating a smart home processor / hub, with a modern overhead garage door opener that has a learn button, is much more challenging.
MyQ
MyQ is the most popular smart home technology used with overhead garage door openers. Some garage door manufacturers have built MyQ’s technology directly into the opener itself. In other situations, a MyQ smart overhead garage door controller can be integrated with a dumb overhead garage door opener. A list of overhead garage door openers compatible with MyQ can be found here.+
MyQ provides homeowners with a number of smart features for controlling their overhead garage doors.
- App Control including the ability to view a live video stream from a MyQ camera located inside the garage (subscriptions are available for 7-day and 30-day storage of video).
- Notifications whenever the garage door is opened / closed.
- Shared access to your garage with family members and trusted neighbors.
- Schedules to close your overhead garage door at specific times of the day.
- Integration with selected Yale smart locks.
- Integration with cars from Kia, Nissan, Tesla, INFINITI, Honda, Accura, Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen, Mitsubishi, and STEER. Some compatible vehicles offer the ability to open / close you overhead garage door based on the car moving inside / outside a virtual boundary (geofence).
- Support for Amazon Key and Walmart+ InHome package delivery services (subscriptions required).
- Diagnostics that will alert you if there is an issue with your garage door.
What MyQ doesn’t provide is a good path for integrating your smart overhead garage door with your smart home processor / hub. MyQ does provide integration with IFTTT. However, this integration relies on cloud services so an Internet outage will defeat your integration. In addition, IFTTTT integration includes the ability to close your garage door but does not provide the ability to open your garage door.
Why Integrate
If your overhead garage door opener doesn’t provide you with app control of the door, the ability to close your door on a schedule, or notifications of when your overhead garage door opens/closes, then these features can all be created through integration with a smart home processor/hub. Even if your overhead garage door opener has MyQ built-in, and offers the broader set of features outlined above, there is still added functionality that can be created through integration. For example, in my own home I’ve had an issue where my neighbor’s cat would wander into my garage while the overhead door was open. When the garage door starts to close the cat sprints out of the garage, breaks the safety beam at the base of the overhead garage door, and stops the garage door from closing. I implemented retry logic in my smart home processor that if the garage door fails to close, the processor will retry closing the garage door up to five times. If, after five attempts, the garage door is still not closed, the system will send a high priority notification to my smart phone.
Another example is that opening the overhead garage door at night, when the house has been unoccupied, can be used to trigger pathway lights within the home to turn on, which makes it much safer to enter the home.
These are just two examples of how integrating the operation of an overhead garage door with your smart home processor / hub can solve unique issues you may have that are not covered by the default functionality offered by even a full featured, off-the-shelf, overhead garage door controller, like MyQ.
Konnected Smart Garage Door Opener blaQ
The Konnected Smart Garage Door Opener (GDO) blaQ does perform a limited number of the same functions as other smart overhead garage door controllers. However, that functionality is limited and it isn’t why you would purchase one. The Konnected GDO blaQ is designed as a gateway to integrate your existing garage door opener with your smart home processor / hub.
The GDO blaQ works with Chamberlain / LiftMaster compatible overhead garage door openers that have a yellow, red, orange, blue, purple, or brown learn button. It will even work with a garage door opener that has MyQ built in or that has an external MyQ controller.
The GDO blaQ uses the ESPHome protocol and can integrate with the following smart home platforms:
- Amazon Alexa
- Control4 (using a driver developed by Chowmain)
- Crestron (using a driver that I developed and can be downloaded from my GitHub here)
- Home Assistant
- HomeSeer
- Hubitat
- SmartThings
While I haven’t tried the other platforms to test their integration with the GDO blaQ, the Crestron-Konnected driver I built supports the following functions:
- Open Door
- Close Door
- Stop Door
- Light On
- Light Off
- Light Toggle
- Lock
- Unlock
Feedback on the open/close state of the overhead garage door, state of the light, and whether the garage door has been locked is also supported by the driver. The driver supports control of multiple Konnected GDO blaQ devices for installations with multiple overhead garage doors. Konnected offers an alternative firmware for the GDO blaQ that provides support for the Matter smart home standard. However, at this point in time, it is not Matter certified.
Finally, for controlling older garage door openers that don’t have a learn button, Konnected offers an alternative model, the Konnected Smart Garage Door Opener White (v2).
Tailwind iQ3 Smart Automatic Garage Controller
I wrote a detailed review of the Tailwind iQ3 that can be found here. So, I won’t go into that level of detail in this article. However, here are the primary features of the Tailwind iQ3.
- Smartphone Integration: Control and monitor the garage door remotely via the Tailwind app (available for iOS and Android).
- Voice Control: Compatible with Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri for voice-activated operation.
- Smart Watch Support: Apple Watch and Android Wear OS watch support for controlling your overhead garage door
- Real-Time Notifications: Receive alerts on the overhead garage door’s status (open, closed, or left open) on your smart phone.
- Geofencing: The overhead garage door can automatically open or close when you arrive or leave based on your phone’s location.
- Shared Access: The ability to give family members, neighbors, or trades people access to your home through your garage
- Night Mode: The Tailwind iQ3 can optionally be configured to automatically close a garage door five minutes after it was opened during the night.
- Activity History: Review a log of past door activities for security tracking.
- Support for Multiple Doors: A single Tailwind iQ3 can control up to three overhead garage doors.
- Sensor Options: Tailwind offers multiple options for the door state (open/close) sensor
- And more…
The Tailwind iQ3 can integrate with a wide range of smart home platforms including:
- Amazon Alexa
- Android Auto
- Apple CarPlay
- Apple HomeKit
- Control4
- Crestron (using a driver that I developed and can be downloaded from my GitHub here)
- Elan
- Google Assistant
- Google Home
- Home Assistant
- Hubitat
- IFTTT
- Nice
- Node-RED
- Python
- RTI
- SmartThings
The Crestron-Tailwind software driver I wrote provides open/close control of up to three overhead garage doors whose control has been integrated with the iQ3. The open/close status of up to three garage doors is also provided. The software supports multiple Tailwind iQ3 controllers for installations with more than three garage doors.
Natively the Tailwind iQ3 can control any overhead garage door except a Chamberlain/LiftMaster compatible opener with a round, yellow learn button. In this case a special wireless adapter is required (more on this below). Tailwind will include an adapter with your order for free.
Openers with other colored, or even a square yellow, learn buttons are fully compatible with the Tailwind iQ3 and don’t require an adapter.
Comparing the Konnected GDO blaQ with the Tailwind iQ3
Because both the Konnected GDO blaQ and the Tailwind iQ3 both have APIs and drivers that allow integrators and smart home enthusiasts to integrate control of their overhead garage doors with a wide range of smart home platforms, I think a brief comparison of the two products is worthwhile.
Advantages of the Konnected GDO blaQ include:
- The Konnected GDO blaQ integrates directly with the garage door opener and communicates using the opener’s native communications protocol. Through this direct integration the GDO blaQ knows whether the overhead garage door is open or closed. It doesn’t require a door sensor. This makes the Konnected GDO blaQ simpler and faster to install.
- To open/close a Chamberlian/LiftMaster compatible door with a round, yellow learn button, the Tailwind iQ3 requires a hacked, battery operated, wireless, remote control that is wired to the TailWind iQ3. Over time the battery in the remote control will die. When this happens, the Tailwind iQ3 will be unable to control the garage door until the remote control’s battery is replaced. The Konnected GDO blaQ doesn’t use any batteries for operation.
Advantages of the Tailwind iQ3 include:
- The Tailwind iQ3 is a fuller featured overhead garage door controller than the Konnected GDO blaQ. It even offers patented features that the MyQ controller doesn’t.
- The Tailwind offers more smart home ecosystem integrations than the Konnected GDO blaQ
- A single Tailwind iQ3 can control up to three overhead garage doors with the purchase of additional door sensors.
- Because a single Tailwind iQ3 can control up to three overhead garage doors (when additional door sensors are purchased) the total cost of automating multiple garage doors can be cheaper than with the Konnected GDO blaQ.
- Updating settings and firmware on the Konnected GDO blaQ is a more “techier” process than many smart home consumers are used to dealing with. Configuration settings are not saved in memory independently of the firmware. So, any time a configuration setting is changed, new firmware has to be built and uploaded to the device.
Conclusions
The integration of an overhead garage door opener with a smart home processor/hub, even if your overhead garage door is already app controlled through MyQ or another smart controller, has real value. The two options for integration with a Chamberlain/LiftMaster compatible garage door with a learn button are the Tailwind iQ3 and the Konnected GDO blaQ. Each product has specific advantages and disadvantages. The choice of which one is best for you is going to depend on your specific situation and requirements.
