garagepi

This is a nodeJS application that runs on a Raspberry PI to control a garage door opener. It uses the Express module to serve a single page application (SPA) and APIs that display the garage door status, history of the door being in the open position, a still picture from the camera, as well as controls to open and close the garage door.

The application displays the Raspberry PI CPU temp, as well as the ambient temp. Web sockets are used to update the browser when the garage door changes position (open/close) as sensed by the door sensor.

Networking

I have my home router configured to update a dynamic DNS service, so I can use a regular domain name instead of remembering my public IP address to access the web app. My router then forwards to an NGINX server, which then forwards to the Raspberry Pi running the node application.

The application is secured with BASIC authentication (update username and password in config.json), so it is highly recommended to use HTTPS. In my implementation, HTTPS is terminated in NGINX, with a forward to the Raspberry Pi, which is listening on socket 3000.

The following is a sample NGINX configuration that uses a self signed certificate and performs a proxy_pass to the Pi. My internal DNS has garagepi and nginxservernamehere defined. WWW traffic is sent to the /garagepi/ path, and web socket traffic is sent to /garagews/.

upstream garagepilogical {
        server garagepi:3000;
}

server {
        listen 8443 ssl;
        server_name nginxservernamehere;
        ssl_certificate cert.pem;
        ssl_certificate_key cert.key;
        ssl_protocols SSLv3 TLSv1 TLSv1.1 TLSv1.2;
        ssl_ciphers "HIGH:!aNULL:!MD5 or HIGH:!aNULL:!MD5:!3DES";
        ssl_prefer_server_ciphers on;
        location /garagepi/ {
                proxy_pass http://garagepilogical/;
                proxy_http_version 1.1;
                proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
                proxy_set_header Connection $connection_upgrade;
        }
        location /garagews/ {
                proxy_pass http://garagepilogical/garagews/;
                proxy_http_version 1.1;
                proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
                proxy_set_header Connection $connection_upgrade;
        }
}

Parts

The following hardware is suggested:

Raspberry PI with Raspbian and node installed.
WiFi Module for connectivity. EdiMax EW-7811Un.
Raspberry PI/Arduino friendly relay module. SunFounder 5V Relay Shield Module for Arduino.
Raspberry PI Camera module.
DS18B20 1-wire thermometer sensor.
4.7k resistor (for DS18B20)
Magnetic door/window switch. uxcell® MC 38 Wired Door Window Sensor Magnetic Switch.

Supplies for connecting and housing:

Sheet metal.
Stand-off screws and nuts for mounting. M3 Standoff Spacers w/ Nuts M3 Screws
Micro-usb cable and charger for power.
Ethernet cable for wire runs from relays to garage door opener and door sensor.
Breadboard female to female and female to male jumper wire.
Uxcell (orange) UY butt splice connectors.

Tips

I originally had this mounted right next to the garage door opener, but discovered that it interfered with the wireless operation of the garage door remotes. Relocating it to the back wall of the garage, and mounting it with the sheet metal out solved the interference problem.

Pictures

Finished project, mounted on garage wall	Components	Camera	Door Sensor

GPIO Left	GPIO Right	Relay to Opener	Relay to GPIO

Main Page	Control	Menu	Door Open Log

##Steps These steps include terminal commands, so a basic knowledge of using SSH is required. PuTTY is a great terminal emulator for Windows. Linux and Mac have ssh built in. Getting familiar with vi or nano to edit files in a shell is also needed. Prefixing commands with sudo will elevate your access to run and edit files that require root permissions. More info can be found here.

###Install Raspbian

####Download Raspbian can be downloaded from the Raspberry Pi Foundation site. The most up to date instructions for downloading and installing on a SD card are found there. Go with the "lite" version of Raspbian, without the full desktop.

####Image SD Card Steps in a nutshell on a Mac:

Download zip file of Raspbian image.
Pop in SD card into a Mac and open Terminal.
cd Downloads
unzip 2016-05-10-raspbian-jessie-lite.zip replace with the latest image zip file name you just downloaded.
diskutil list to get the disk number of the SD card (ex: the number 2 in /dev/disk2)
sudo dd bs=1m if=2016-05-10-raspbian-jessie-lite.img of=/dev/rdisk2 replace image file name and your disk number. NOTE "rdisk" here and not just "disk"!
sudo diskutil eject /dev/rdisk2 replace your disk number

####Boot Up Steps to Getting Raspbian Up:

Remove your SD card from your computer and insert card into Raspberry Pi.
You can plug in your USB WiFi adapter at this time.
Plug the Raspberry Pi into Ethernet and power.
Optionally plug into a monitor/TV and keyboard. You can proceed headless, but need an ethernet cable attached.
Raspbian will automatically boot up and resize the filesystem to fill the SD card and is ready to SSH into.

####General Troubleshooting To check system logs, you can type dmesg to dump kernel and driver log messages when looking into issues. This can help with checking on the USB WiFi interface.

####Get Online Remote Access to Raspberry Pi (ssh)

Perform the Setup WiFi steps if you don't have an ethernet cable attached, so you have internet access from the Pi.
Get your Raspberry Pi IP Address
- If you have a monitor/TV hooked up and ethernet attached, it will log "My IP address is ..." about 20 lines up from the login prompt.
- Go to your router admin page to see what the IP address became.
- Login with monitor/TV and keyboard attached and run ifconfig to find inet addr.
ssh pi@192.168.1.20 replacing with your Raspberry Pi IP address. Password is raspberry by default.
Raspbian user information is documented on the Raspbian site. Changing the password is probably a good idea, since this device will be controlling your garage door.
Either via Ethernet or WiFi, the Raspberry Pi needs to be on a network and connected to the internet at this point.

####Apply Updates Make sure Raspbian is all up to date. This could take some time to finish.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

And the Raspberry Pi firmware is up to date.

sudo rpi-update

If rpi-update is not installed, install it with sudo apt-get install rpi-update.

It is probably best to reboot at this point.

sudo reboot

###Setup WiFi This is probably one of the first things you'll want to do so you can SSH into the Pi. Plug in the wireless USB adapter to get started. Instructions can be found here, but here's the gist of it.

You can scan for WiFi networks using sudo iwlist wlan0 scan. This is an easy way to make sure the adapter is recognized and working. To get connected, you need to know your routers SSID and password. This should work for both WPA and WPA2 security.

Add the following to the bottom of the /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf file. In order to get permissions, you'll have to sudo vi /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf.

network={
    ssid="YourRouterSSID"
    psk="YourRouterPassword"
}

It should notice the file changed and try to connect to your router, if you do not have enthernet connected. Your best bet is to do a reboot (sudo reboot) at this point and unplug the ethernet cable before it boots up. The IP address would have now changed, since it is now using WiFi instead of ethernet.

###Setup Raspbian for OneWire Support Raspbian includes support for the OneWire bus used by the DS18B20 temperature sensor. Here's how to enable it.

Add dtoverlay=w1-gpio to the /boot/config.txt.

Reboot with sudo reboot.

With the DS18B20 sensor connected to GPIO 4, 3v and a ground pin, confirm it is recognized by going to the w1 devices folder, seeing a device listed starting with 28 (usually), and checking the w1_slave file for a reading. My ID was 28-01156206bdff, so yours will be different.

pi@garagepi ~ $ cd /sys/bus/w1/devices
pi@garagepi /sys/bus/w1/devices $ ls
28-01156206bdff  w1_bus_master1
pi@garagepi /sys/bus/w1/devices $ cd 28-01156206bdff
pi@garagepi /sys/bus/w1/devices/28-01156206bdff $ cat w1_slave 
70 01 80 80 1f ff 80 80 7a : crc=7a YES
70 01 80 80 1f ff 80 80 7a t=23000
pi@garagepi /sys/bus/w1/devices/28-01156206bdff $

You will want to make a note of this ID to update the w1deviceid in the config.json file later, when we pull the source code down and start to set it up.

  "ambtempsensor": {
    "enabled": true,
    "w1deviceid": "28-01156206bdff",
    "intervalsecs": 5
  },

###Setting DS18B20 Accuracy By default, the DS18B20 sensor is 9bit accuracy. Check out this answer on stackoverflow on how to change it to 12bit accuracy. Note that this does increase the read time, which should not be an issue for this project.

###Setup Camera and Set TimeZone Use sudo raspi-config to enable the camera and timezone. A menu will come up where you will see the options. It is pretty straight forward, but check camera more info and timezone more info.

If you do not have the camera, it can be disabled in config.json until you attain one.

###Setup WiringPi WiringPi is a command-line utility to operate the GPIO pins. It will be used to check the position of the garage door and operate the relay for the garage door opener. It is also used by the code to read/write the GPIO pins. Install it as follows.

sudo apt-get install wiringpi

###Setup Garage Door Position Sensor With the reed switch connected to GPIO15 and a ground pin, here's how to test the operation. gpio is a command-line utility that we'll use to test, which was installed in the previous step.

To set GPIO15 as an input pin, use gpio -g mode 15 in.

To read the state of GPIO15, use gpio -g read 15. An output of 0 means the door is closed, 1 means the door is open.

###Setup the Garage Door Button Relay With the relay connected to GPIO2, 5 volt and ground pins, we can use the gpio command-line to test the operation.

To set GPIO2 as an output pin, use gpio -g mode 2 out.

To close the relay, we need to set the value to zero with gpio -g write 2 1.

To open the relay, we need to set the value to one with gpio -g write 2 0.

To simulate a button press where the relay closes for 250ms, the following script can be used as a test:

#!/bin/bash
gpio -g mode 2 out
gpio -g write 2 1
sleep .25
gpio -g write 2 0

###Install Dependencies The following will install the other dependencies needed.

####Install node Node can be installled from the default repositories, but it is older and runs by the command nodejs, which is bothersome. This needs to be improved to install the latest node and is a bit of a mess right now, but these instructions get you going by pulling node from the Node.js site itself.

Go to https://nodejs.org/download/release/latest/ and find the tar.gz file for ARMv6. Here are the commands for the latest at the time of writing this.

wget https://nodejs.org/download/release/latest/node-v6.2.0-linux-armv6l.tar.gz
sudo tar xf node-v6.2.0-linux-armv6l.tar.gz --strip-components=1 -C /usr/local

Substitute node-v6.2.0-linux-armv6l.tar.gz for whatever latest distribution you find there for ARMv6.

####Install Git Git will also be needed.

sudo apt-get install git

###Setup GaragePi Grab garagepi (this code) from git using git clone https://github.com/scwissel/garagepi.git garagepi. Go into the garagepi folder and run npm install to install any dependent node packages.

Make sure to update config.json the following:

Your chosen username and password.
Temp sensor ID for your DS18B20.
Disable the camera, if you don't want to see it complain when it tries to take still pictures.

Start garagepi with node garageapi.js.

Access the web application by browsing to the IP address of your Raspberry Pi on port 3000. For example, if your Raspberry Pi has an IP address of 192.168.1.10, then use the following in your laptop or PC browser while connected to the same WiFi network as the Raspberry Pi: http://192.168.1.10:3000. You should get prompted to login with your username and password you setup in config.js and see the main page.

To have GaragePi automatically start when on bootup, add the following to /etc/rc.local just before the last line containing exit 0.

su -l pi -c '/home/pi/garagepi/runbg.sh'

##To Do

Terminate HTTPS at the Raspberry Pi to reduce complexity of setup.
Clean-up dependencies.
Add support for second garage door.