Quality of Life Improvements with Home Assistant Automation Tasks

[Supratachophobia]

Coming from a Tesla that already had the "open garage door on approach/departure" feature, I found the manual necessity of the Rivian implementation disappointing and downright unreliable. Like 3/5 times successfully working.

So I just thought I'd share a little automation using the Home Assistant Rivian integration that has been a super reliable, and quite frankly better solution to a feature that's been half-baked since delivery.

Fair warning, you need to be running Home Assistant AND be willing to satisfy the integration's requirements.

Essentially, when the state of the vehicle changes from away to home, which ends up being perfectly at the bottom of the driveway prior to turning in, the automation checks to see if the garage door is open and if it's not, triggers the opening. No driver input needed and no waiting for the door to go up. Nice and simple. Now if I could just get the mirrors to fold.....

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[Freemanc80]

Is this triggering the Rivian's integrated garage door remote to send a signal to the garage door receiver, or triggering a smart garage integration directly to open the door? I only ask because I was trying to find a way to do this. I have wifi connected garage doors, but MyQ stopped offering 3rd party compatibility for communications, and every other way I have found requires an additional piece of hardware to "integrate" (basically tap into via hardwire) in order for it to work. Thanks.

 

[Nano]

Great idea! I have the same question.

 

[Supratachophobia]

Is this triggering the Rivian's integrated garage door remote to send a signal to the garage door receiver, or triggering a smart garage integration directly to open the door? I only ask because I was trying to find a way to do this. I have wifi connected garage doors, but MyQ stopped offering 3rd party compatibility for communications, and every other way I have found requires an additional piece of hardware to "integrate" (basically tap into via hardwire) in order for it to work. Thanks.

So, good question. I have an abhorrence for wireless if there's any option for wired. I have 5v relays running on Konnected boards that hardwire to each opener switch. So when you signal Home Assistant to trigger the opener, it's pressing the physical button for all intents and purposes. The open/close state is determined by a hardwire door sensor on the garage door jam itself.

For this project, Home Assistant is getting notified the car is home, so it checks the door sensor state, and then activates it's own switch if applicable. This skips any input from the Rivian homelink and the nonsense about range/length of press/no prompt that I constantly run into.

I remember reading myQ was getting rid of 3rd party support so I'm not sure how you could trigger your opener outside of it's apps ecosystem. You could always run something else in parallel like you mentioned.

Next steps are to noodle on additional improvements to tide me over until Rivian can play catch up. One thought is a reminder to plug the car in if it's after a certain time of night, trigger lights when pulling in, trigger the door to close when leaving, etc. The one thing I will say about this particular project, is the door status check. The Tesla will trigger the door regardless of the state so sometimes it would close on you as you pulled up if it was already open.

 

[Freemanc80]

Ok, yeah I have Konnected's alarm integration, and also running HA on a Raspberry Pi. I did see the Konnected garage door boards as well when I did my alarm integration. Was just hoping to figure out a back door without having to buy more hardware. I have been super paranoid about opening and closing garage doors after I came home one day and had just opened the garage door, but the car was so quiet, my wife looked out and didn't see or hear that I was home and pushed the garage door button in the garage to close it. I of course was checking my camera and mirrors as I backed in, but the garage door was still just a bit too high on its way down for me to see it, and bam....I met it right at the rear antenna on the Rivian......Sad day, but luckly just a few cosmetic scratches on the top corner of the car, and a small dent in the garage door.

 

[Supratachophobia]

Ok, yeah I have Konnected's alarm integration, and also running HA on a Raspberry Pi. I did see the Konnected garage door boards as well when I did my alarm integration. Was just hoping to figure out a back door without having to buy more hardware. I have been super paranoid about opening and closing garage doors after I came home one day and had just opened the garage door, but the car was so quiet, my wife looked out and didn't see or hear that I was home and pushed the garage door button in the garage to close it. I of course was checking my camera and mirrors as I backed in, but the garage door was still just a bit too high on its way down for me to see it, and bam....I met it right at the rear antenna on the Rivian......Sad day, but luckly just a few cosmetic scratches on the top corner of the car, and a small dent in the garage door.

For the relays with Konnected, I just ordered a 4 pack of dual relays on Amazon for $6.99 so the investment is minimal. They get powered from the Konnected 5v output and triggered from the zone when you set it's property in HA as "switchable output". Just make sure the trigger is "high".

That's very odd about the partially open door. Any way you can get a sensor wired into konnected so you can run some logic through the open/close process? And ditch that Pi! Unless you are running on an SSD. I lost my first 3 HA instances to SD card failures.

 

[Freemanc80]

Unfortunately, my konnected boards are in my 2nd floor attic by my alarm panel about 50 feet away from my garage door openers. As far as the partially open door, it was totally my wife's fault for not paying attention. The door was closing after I had just opened it because she didn't see or hear me pull in the driveway, and I just didn't see the door closing in my mirror or camera because it hadn't come down far enough yet. It barely made it down far enough when I crossed the threshold into the garage.

I am running on an SSD, and don't have a ton of logic running. Mostly my alarm panel setup to monitor those sensors and arm/disarm remotely.

 

[therealcmj]

For anyone else looking at this: if you have home assistant already working then Esphome with a generic relay could handle this for under $10 total.

https://devices.esphome.io/devices/Generic-Relay

 

[Supratachophobia]

For anyone else looking at this: if you have home assistant already working then Esphome with a generic relay could handle this for under $10 total.

https://devices.esphome.io/devices/Generic-Relay

I think his problem is the lack of wire run. Sometimes you just need to get creative with that CAT6.....

 

[Zoidz]

If you are OK with using wifi, Shelly hardware is compatible with HomeAssistant and is inexpensive at $13 to $20 per node from Amazon.

 

[RBM3]

For those with Myq openers wanting to integrate with HomeKit you can install the liftmaster HomeKit bridge. I ordered one once they broke the integration with homebridge and it’s been super reliable. additional benefits have been obstruction notifications and the fact Myq is no longer connected to WiFi. They’ve stopped making my them because they want to sell the Myq service, but I found a site that still had them in stock. Here’s a link to the online store that still has them.

https://www.northshorecommercialdoor.com/product/liftmaster-819lmb-home-bridge-kit/

 

[PeterSK]

The Tesla will trigger the door regardless of the state so sometimes it would close on you as you pulled up if it was already open.

This is exactly why I turned off the Tesla automatic triggering, plus the fact that occasionally I want to just park in the driveway without opening the garage door.

For my use case the Rivian implementation is much better - I can just right click the right button without looking for and then stabbing at an on-screen icon that moved locations periodically after Tesla updates.

As for the original post, you can either hard wire and program a bunch of stuff, or click a button on the steering wheel. I’ll take the latter.

 

[LeDiable]

One thought is a reminder to plug the car in if it's after a certain time of night

While I have a lot of IoT devices, my home is not super smart so this is probably the one thing I use HA for most, and it was super simple to implement...

 

[Supratachophobia]

This is exactly why I turned off the Tesla automatic triggering, plus the fact that occasionally I want to just park in the driveway without opening the garage door.

For my use case the Rivian implementation is much better - I can just right click the right button without looking for and then stabbing at an on-screen icon that moved locations periodically after Tesla updates.

As for the original post, you can either hard wire and program a bunch of stuff, or click a button on the steering wheel. I’ll take the latter.

My problem was unreliable operation of the steering wheel button. And yes, it's gotten better with software, but as with many things Rivian, is just not quite there yet. I'm truly happy for those that don't have any issues. But I wouldn't have gone through the effort unless my patience-o-meter had run out.

 

[nodor]

While I have a lot of IoT devices, my home is not super smart so this is probably the one thing I use HA for most, and it was super simple to implement...

I have basically this exact automation setup on HA and love it.

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