Now that we have our ESP32 ready to rock and roll it is deployment time! The first thing we need to do is to use an MQTT broker with authentication. So far we have done all our tests using the free io.eclipse.org server without any kind of authentication, this means, if somebody knows the topics you are using, could open/close your garage door. Not good!
In this second post of this series, we’ll see how to connect a couple of magentic switches, one for each door, that will allow us to see if a door is closed or not.
I’m using this one in particular: https://www.adafruit.com/product/375 .
This sensor has two wires, one goes to ground (GND) and the second one to an output GPIO pin. In my case I’m using pins 25 and 26 for the left and right door respectively.
Four years ago, I got to wire up a Raspberry Pi to a 2 channel relay and a couple of sensors, and hook it up to my garage door openers. This allowed me to open/close any of the doors, as well as to see if the doors were open or closed. Here is blog post I wrote then explaining all I did: https://www.cyberhades.com/2014/02/04/controlando-las-puertas-del-garaje-con-un-raspberry-pi/ (Spanish) . This setup suffered a couple evolutions, adding into the picture an MQTT broker ( mosquitto ), an Android app and even an application for my good old Pebble watch. Although I never published any of theses evolutions, here you can watch a video opening my garage door (as you can see is also a different house… military life…):