Documentation for GaragePi Setup
Background
I found this setup that was posted by Renjith Nair using MQTT and Home Assistant , but found the instructions listed either made assumptions on how to do something or have changed with newer releases of software. Below are the steps I took to create my GaragePi and get it working with Home Assistant. I also modified it to work my garage door opener lights.
A little additional background. I have had a Garage_Pi setup for about 6 years using Andrew Shillday's setup. However, I broke it a while back while trying to better secure it and trying to add some additional functionality. I didn't have the time or knowledge to get it working at that time, so it has sat for about 6 months while I was working on other things. I recently setup Home Assistant, which got me thinking about the GaragePi again. And that's where we are today.
I will not be going through the steps to do the initial setup of a Raspberry Pi as it is well documented on raspberrypi.com (installing and initial setup of Raspberry Pi OS).
Components in my setup
- Raspberry Pi 3B running Raspberry OS Lite (Bullseye at the time of this writing)
- Raspberry Pi 4 or Raspberry Pi Zero W will work for this as well.
- 16GB SD card for GaragePi
- A P/N 8601 Magnetic Switch for each Garage Door (2 in my case)
- A 3 pin PIR Motion Sensor
- Some low voltage wire (I used left over from garage door controller install)
- A 4 Channel 5V Relay Switch Module similar to this one
- A bread board to make things a little easier to connect (I will likely remove this at some point)
- A GPIO breakout similar to this one
- I will likely change this out to one of these at some point to clean it up a little.
- Wall Garage Door opener remotes.
- I used these versus connecting to the garage door opener directly from the relay or connecting to my existing wallmount door controllers. I wanted to be able to control the lights on the door openers and didn't want to run wires all the way to the wall controllers.
- A mounting board (plastic) that I found somewhere years ago. I will also likely redo this and design something to print (or find something to print) to hold the components to help with the WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor).
- Home Assistant
- Below I will cover how I set this up on a Raspberry Pi and it's actually pretty much identical to installing Raspberry Pi OS.
- I am using a Raspberry Pi 4 to run it, but it can be run on other OS's also. Check out home-assistant.io for more information.
- I am using a 64GB SD card for my Home Assistant. I wanted to make sure to have a decent amount of storage for it.
Setup Home Assistant
Home_Assistant/homeassistant-install.md