 Back in 2019, I took my 1980s garage door opener, which used to work like this, and made it smart, meaning that I could control it with my phone. Unfortunately, while it worked perfectly at the time, the two years that followed have been less than stellar, to say the least. See, look, here's the board we were using. It's not in there anymore, is it? Unfortunately, today, I think we finally have the ultimate solution, and since this video is sponsored by Pulseway, that should give you some idea as to what the solution is. For those of you who are a little slow, it's a server. It's always a server, isn't it, Jake? When I bought this house, it still had the original garage door openers from the 1980s, so when I wanted to add some kind of smart remote control functionality to it, the most obvious solution was to just replace them. So I went on Amazon and bought a smart Chamberlain garage door opener with the intention of installing it myself, only to read through the documentation and realize that it was a $1 a month subscription fee for if this, then that integration, so I could use my Google Assistant, a dollar a month? I was outraged. I'm not paying a subscription fee. So instead, I spent a whole year's subscription worth of money on this cheap Chinese relay thing that connects to your Wi-Fi and will actually press the button just by bridging the contacts for you. And as I said before, it worked perfectly. I'd give my voice command, it would go through my if this, then that recipe, and then click, click, it would activate the door. The only non-ideal thing was that this has no way of knowing if the garage door is open or closed, but that was easy enough to install with a little roost device or with a garage security camera. Only it's traumatic to think about that time now because that's when the first major thing went wrong. I had the audacity to replace my wireless access point. I went from my ruckus one to my ubiquity one, which should have been fine, except that my relay wouldn't connect to the new access point even after I changed the SSID and the password to exactly the same one. No problem, I thought. I've seen that before. All I gotta do is a factory resell, oh my God. There is no way to factory reset this thing. You actually just have to throw it away if you don't remember to change the credentials on it before you change your Wi-Fi. So that's okay. I went and bought a more expensive and feature rich four channel saw off one and it was back to working perfectly until we opened the vault garage door. One day it randomly stopped working. After some quick Googling, it turns out that eWiLink stopped allowing if this than that integration free of charge, which after I threw a temper tantrum on Twitter, I found out was because if this than that changed their billing policies, making it so that eWiLink had to pay far more per user. I had a call with if this than that CEO where it was off the record, unfortunately, so I can't really share all the details, but ultimately they walked me through how if this than that is to survive, they basically have to make some kind of change and they feel like allowing individual users for free to create up to three recipes of their own and then use an unlimited number of other already existing recipes seems like a reasonable middle ground. Unfortunately for me, that means that something as simple as open Odyssey garage door, close Odyssey garage door, open vault garage door and close vault garage door exceeds the freaking limit. No bother said I, I will just change all of the voice commands to activate Odyssey garage door and activate vault garage door since quite frankly, the relay stupid doodad, whether it's this one or the saw off has no idea if it's open or closed. Anyway, it was just kind of like a user friendliness thing. Then it really hit the fan. My ancient garage door opener that I had spent all this freaking time smartifying outright died. So when I called a local garage door installer company, cause frankly I didn't feel like installing it myself. They basically said, look, there's only like one unit that we install and everything. So either you take it or you don't. I kind of went, yeah, okay, sure. I come home from work and sure enough, there it is a brand new lift master. And those of you who know anything about the industry will probably know that like eyeglass frames, the garage door opener industry is basically a monopoly and lift master is owned by you guessed it Chamberlain, the company that I was trying to freaking avoid because of their subscription fee in the first place. No problem said I, I'll just take the same leads off of my relay and plonk them onto the back of the wall unit, just like before. No subscription fee for me is what I thought. But the installer explains to me, and this was very helpful that these smart garage door openers no longer actually work the way the old ones did where they just pretty much closed a circuit. These ones are only powered by the wires in your wall. And instead they actually transmit wirelessly to the garage door opener units, just like the fob that you have in your car. So you can't use a relay in the way that you used to where you just kind of, well, bridge the contacts at the back. Ha ha ha, not to be defeated. I quickly grabbed one of the PCBs out of a wall unit and soldered some leads of my own to the activation switch so that effectively my relay going off was just pushing the same switch that I would normally push with my finger. Ha ha, genius. Too bad the system worked too well. I sent this video over to Maddie from ElectroBoom showing that while my Google voice assistant commands to open and close the door did in fact work with my soldered leads here, unfortunately the garage door would also just randomly activate itself. He explained it to me and it's something to do with analog circuitry and having a very high level of sensitivity to electromagnetic interference. Basically what it means is that these wires coming off of the switch were acting as antennas and triggering it sometimes repeatedly in the middle of the night. I mean that's a bit of a security problem, don't you think? With guidance from Maddie, I salvaged some capacitors and resistors from a random donor board that I had kicking around and attempted to put some kind of filtering on this circuit in order to prevent it from happening. But after spending an entire afternoon on it I thought, you know what, enough's enough. My wife will not get off my case about how the garage doors don't freaking work properly. I'm just gonna use Chamberlain's own MyQ software. How bad can it be? Terrible, it turns out. So here's my current setup then. With the Chamberlain MyQ app, you can from anywhere in the world see the status of your garage doors, how long they've been in that state. So here you see the vault's been open for four minutes and you can activate them either way. Well what's so bad about that? That sounds pretty great. Well a couple of things. For starters, it constantly logs both me and my wife out seemingly whenever our IP address changes like, oh I don't know, say for example when we're just coming into Wi-Fi at home or just leaving the range of our Wi-Fi and switching over to cellular data. That seems like a pretty small problem. And blindness, you might say. I mean why are you pulling out your phone anyway? This whole journey freaking started because you wanted to open and close your garage door with a voice command. Why not just use MyQ's integration with if this then that, which by the way, they don't charge a dollar a month for anymore. They now provide it for free. Well I'll tell you why. Because it only allows you to close the door. When I get home at the end of the day, I cannot say, okay we will open the garage door. It doesn't allow it through if this then that. So I'm stuck with one of the following. A, a relay that randomly opens my garage doors and does randomly close them as well. So that's good. That's a good feature. B, an app that constantly logs me out so I have to log into it in my driveway in order to go home to my house or C, a voice assistant that only closes the doors but does not open them. Oh right, also there is D, I could just use the stupid fob thing that goes on your visor like a normal human being. But it's a huge security problem to keep those things in your car and quite frankly, I cannot be arsed to like carry it around with me all the time. So I know I'll end up leaving it in my car, which is how people break into your house. So what this whole experience has highlighted for me is a couple of the big problems with smart home stuff in general. One is unexpected service interruptions or policy changes that can brick already perfectly functioning setups and number two is poor or incomplete interoperability between different brands and platforms. Now there's only so much we can do about the first one. Terms of service can change. But at least for the second thing, there actually is a solution and it's called home assistant. Conveniently I already have a home server that's perfectly capable of running Docker containers or virtual machines already running unraid. So we're going to show you guys the steps that we went through to get home assistant up and running. Now what we're doing with it today is pretty basic taking a myQ device and having it work with Google assistant. But there is so much that you can do with this that we are barely even scratching the surface. It's super cool. In a nutshell, home assistant is an open source home automation platform. It's kind of like if this than that, except that you can host it yourself and it's a lot more versatile. Basically if you can dream it or well at least program it, it's doable with home assistant. Our first home assistant inspired solution was based around using my existing saw off inching relay opener and then a cheap Zigbee hub and a door sensor. The idea was that after issuing our chosen voice command through Google assistant, home assistant would run a little script in the background to check the door status and then decide whether or not to trigger the garage. That would be to prevent me from accidentally opening a garage door that was already open, which would actually close it and vice versa. Now this is a great configuration because it relies on fewer cloud services. But for me, the whole Zigbee thing is a rabbit hole that I'm not ready to go down yet. Partly because I don't have to. It turns out that the fancy new garage door openers that I splurged on have a direct integration thanks to home assistant with support for opening the door, which really makes those other limitations seem pretty frustrating and arbitrary, doesn't it? It'll just take some setting up. First off, because of the way Google assistant works, a few things need to be in place for it to be able to access your self-hosted home assistant instance. First, you'll need a domain name that you can use so Google knows where to look. Second, you'll need an SSL certificate set up for that domain for security. And third, you'll need remote access to that instance by way of port forwarding. Luckily for us, there are a few ways that we can make this a lot easier than it sounds. But for those of you who don't want to dabble in all this techno wizardry, there is a workaround that avoids all of it, as well as helping with the security concerns of having your home assistant instance being public facing. It's called home assistant cloud. It's a partnered service run by the founder of home assistant, where they host it in the cloud for you. And then you can actually just tie it into Google assistant directly without any annoying manual configuration. However, that means that you are again relying on a cloud service to host it as well as paying a bloody subscription, which was what I was trying to avoid. So here comes the more DIY fun way to do it featuring my unraid NAS. Let's check that out real quick. This is my combination home NAS and server. So it's got about 60 terabytes of storage, which is more than I need, at least for my personal projects, 14 core processor, 64 gigs of RAM, and naturally it's running pulse way for monitoring. So I can keep tabs on it, have remote access, and of course get notifications if anything goes wrong. To help you guys follow along, a full text tutorial on the Linus tech tips forum will be linked in the video description because it is simply too much to fit into a video. First up, snag a domain from your favorite registrar. For the purposes of this video, we'll be using autopilottonowhere.com. If you have a static IP, just set it in your DNS provider. But if your IP is dynamic, that means changing, you'll need to set up dynamic DNS or a program that updates your DNS record when your IP changes. Since our domain is managed through cloud flare, the unraid community app cloudflare dDNS works perfectly for this. Then to proxy our local home assistant instance into a public facing domain and to handle the free automatically renewing SSL certificate, we will use another community app called nginx proxy manager. Before we can set up the SSL certificate in it though, we'll need to set up our port forwarding rules so that we can actually verify that we own the domain. This is going to vary based on your router, so use your Google foo if you aren't familiar, but in the Ubiquiti control panel anyway, it's super easy. Note, by the way, you'll want to make sure that your unraid NAS or other machine that's running all this gear actually has a static local IP. Otherwise, those port forwarding rules that you set up could just break unexpectedly. Back in the proxy manager, set up your SSL certificate as well as the host proxy with your domain and bam, we install home assistant and we can access it remotely. The sky is now officially the limit. But like really, with home assistant, you could make it turn off all your lights when all paired devices leave a geofenced location like your house, or you could have it turn on your sprinklers for you at a certain time unless your moisture sensor in your yard has detected rain or if you don't feel like one of those, you can also just integrate it with the local weather report, or you could make a sawn off button work with a ye light bulb. The possibilities are endless. In our case, we're just simply going to link my garage door openers, my queue program to home assistant and then set up Google assistant integration. This is a pretty long process for self-hosted peeps, so follow the instructions linked in the description for that. But once it's set up, we can add it directly to our Google home app and badda bing, badda boom, two garages. Yes. So it's all working in theory. What about in practice? Okay, nerd, open both garages. It finally works. Oh, man. I know, right? So big thank you to you for watching. Thank you to Jake for fixing my garage again. And of course, thank you to Pulseway for sponsoring this video. Pulseway, if you guys aren't familiar, is the solution to monitoring your systems and your servers. They've got support for Windows, Mac and Linux, and they allow you to see all kinds of important stats on your systems, like what the CPU usage is, RAM usage is, storage, basic stuff like that, but also apply custom scripts, roll updates and remotely access your machines. And all of that stuff can be done from the comfort of your lawn chair through their mobile apps available for iOS and Android. So naturally I use Pulseway for all kinds of things. So let me know if my server is down or unresponsive or if my storage is reaching a critical level, but you can use it for basically anything. So learn more at the link down below and check out Pulseway for yourself. Even personal users can actually get a lot of benefit. So guys do go check it out. If you guys enjoyed this video and you want the full history of how this got started, maybe check out the original where we Smartified my OG 1985 garage door openers. It's so slow. I hate that. But because we're using the MyQ integration, there's no getting around it. When I was just using the relay, I didn't have to wait for that. Yeah. So if I could still use the relay, honestly, I would, but this is fine.