Abstract

I'm not the first person to create a Raspberry Pi Garage Door Opener. However, I will be using the slightly newer and cheaper Raspberry Pi Zero W, which is a better option than the model B for something single purpose like this. Many of the previous versions I have seen involve the Pi hosting a website that's available on your home's local network. This website lets you open and close the garage door. I'm going for a lower level solution in this project, where we simply remotely call a script on the RaspPi using SSH. My goal is just a single button on my smart phone that opens and/or closes the garage door. Stretch goal would be to call this script based on some GPS data on my phone or my car that could just open the door for me as I approach the garage.

Parts

Raspberry Pi Zero W

https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-zero-w/ This version of the Raspberry Pi comes with scaled down USB and HDMI ports and no Ethernet. Its cheaper than the B, and it also doesn't come with pre-soldered header pins, which will let us more easily solder our own wires to make the final product a little more robust. This device will serve as the bridge between the world of digital network communications via TCP and the world of General Purpose Input/Output (GPIO) electronics.

5V relay

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00E0NTPP4/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 This device lets us take a 3.3V GPIO signal from the Raspberry Pi, and use it to flip on or off the 5V signal needed to control the garage door. Think of it as the electronic equivalent of a light switch. This one has more channels than I actually need, but I wasn't able to find any single channel 5V relays.