> It's interesting how that idea vanished and now it is just about monetizing convenience.
Safety is mostly a solved problem for garage doors, they’re required to open back up if they make contact with an obstruction and are also required to have a safety beam to reverse direction if something trips the beam. I assume they use some kind of current switch to detect overcurrent in the motor and open the door, a pressure switch across the bottom of the door seems expensive and finicky vs detecting motor overcurrent. I remember when we got a garage door with both safety features as a kid in the 90s.
And yes, the easiest way to integrate this into a building automation system would be a networked actuator that presses a physical button, lol. You could probably figure out which traces are for enabling the motor on the controller board, but I’d take the easy route ;) They could easily provide a terminal block, but you can’t monetize that. Commercial overhead door openers usually provide contacts for whatever integrations you want.
If you want to monitor open/closed and door_is_moving state with more granularity than a tilt sensor, two magnetic door position sensors and a current switch plus a controller can do it. That’s how commercial overhead doors do it, anyways.
Current switch detects door operation in progress, plus a door position sensor at the top and bottom of the track. Align the top sensor when the door is fully open and the bottom sensor while the door is fully closed. Three binary inputs to monitor. If both door sensors are ‘open’ and the current switch is off, the door is stuck between open and closed. You can get by with just one door sensor if you don’t need to know if it’s fully open.
Safety is mostly a solved problem for garage doors, they’re required to open back up if they make contact with an obstruction and are also required to have a safety beam to reverse direction if something trips the beam. I assume they use some kind of current switch to detect overcurrent in the motor and open the door, a pressure switch across the bottom of the door seems expensive and finicky vs detecting motor overcurrent. I remember when we got a garage door with both safety features as a kid in the 90s.
And yes, the easiest way to integrate this into a building automation system would be a networked actuator that presses a physical button, lol. You could probably figure out which traces are for enabling the motor on the controller board, but I’d take the easy route ;) They could easily provide a terminal block, but you can’t monetize that. Commercial overhead door openers usually provide contacts for whatever integrations you want.
If you want to monitor open/closed and door_is_moving state with more granularity than a tilt sensor, two magnetic door position sensors and a current switch plus a controller can do it. That’s how commercial overhead doors do it, anyways.
Current switch detects door operation in progress, plus a door position sensor at the top and bottom of the track. Align the top sensor when the door is fully open and the bottom sensor while the door is fully closed. Three binary inputs to monitor. If both door sensors are ‘open’ and the current switch is off, the door is stuck between open and closed. You can get by with just one door sensor if you don’t need to know if it’s fully open.