WeMo Maker Garage Door With Notification & Siri

This is an improvement on an Instructable that I found here. This was an amazing Instructable and I used it for a few years before stumbling across this information. I wanted to take this a bit further. I wanted to know anytime that my garage door opened.

There were several times I found the need to open my garage door remotely to allow friends or family into my house or garage. But, I had to ensure that the door opened and that the door shut. Without a camera inside my garage or outside I had to verify with the person at my house as to the garage door status. Thankfully WeMo Maker makes this very easy. I found that some garage doors have contacts for a door open/close magnetic contact. Well, mine did not and so I thought all hope was lost. But, it was fairly simple to just connect the magnetic door contact to the "Sensor" of the WeMo Maker.

• WeMo Maker
• Potter Amseco ODC-59A Overhead Door Switch
  • (Any magnetic door contact will work. Just liked the look of this one)
• CAT5 Cable (CAT5E or CAT6 will also work)
• 22-2 Stranded DC Wire

I thought that this was going to be the easy part but it turned out after I mounted the contact I had to adjust it by changing where I placed the screws in the holes. I had the magnetic contact mounted up too high and when the garage door closed it put pressure on the magnetic contact and the top of the garage door.

If I had thought this through a little more I would have closed the garage door and mounted it with the garage door frame with the door closed to ensure clearance. But, I was in a hurry and had a previous contraption in the same place I wanted the magnetic closure wiring so I started there instead.

This was a bit overkill on the photos but I wanted to make sure that it could easily be seen how I mounted this. With the garage door open I found out where I would need to place the magnetic closure compared to the placement of the magnetic switch. I had to fabricate an arm to bolt to the garage door track in order to make this work the way I wanted. There are other ways to do this but this is the one I preferred.

I used a piece of flat bar steel and did my measurements to see how long the shorter L-shape need to be and did the same for the long portion of the L-shaped arm. I used a cutting torch and a vice to heat up the flat bar and bend it to my liking. I also painted the flat bar afterwards to make it look a bit cleaner. I am a big fan of zip ties and used them anytime I can as you can see.

In the master closet of my home is where the control panel for the home security system was installed. There was already a 120V wall outlet and all the items needed to keep the WeMo maker in a climate controlled environment. I ran both the magnetic door sensor wiring (added the 22-2 wiring for length) as well as a CAT5 cable I had connected to the garage door opener ports (red & white) on the garage door to my master closet.

The first picture is the wiring of my garage door. The red and white connectors on the left side is the push button garage door opener mounted on the wall in my garage. I utilized the same red and white connections to plugin the "Relay" portion of the WeMo Maker with the blue pairs of the CAT5 cable The second photo is the CAT5 cable run through the same box into the attic that is used for the PIR sensor that prevents the garage door from closing on you. I did some fancy routing and zip tying to ensure it had a clean look.

After running the wiring to the master closet we need to terminate it on the WeMo Maker device. The overhead door switch I ordered came with red and green cabling. I soldered the red wire from the door switch to the black wire on the 22-2 wiring. I then soldered the green wire to the red wire on the 22-2 wiring. (After completing this project I should have probably tied red to red and green to black on the overhead door sensor. But, instead of de-soldering and removing heat-shrink tape I just dealt with it.)

Photo 1

This displays the settings to match once you have the WeMo Maker added to the WeMo app. Specifically you want to ensure the "Switch Type" is "Momentary" and "Sensor" is "Yes".

Momentary will momentarily send power to the garage door to open or close it and then remove power so the garage door doesn't think you are just holding the garage door button down.

Photo 2:

Next you need to add a rule to send a push alert when your garage door opens. Click the "Rules" button displayed at the bottom of the screen.

Photo 3:

Select "With Maker Sensor" from the list.

Photo 4:

Select your WeMo Maker sensor as the "If" and select "Sensor triggered". Modify the "Notify Me" message to whatever you prefer it to say. I set the "Rule Name" to match the "Notify Message" for clarity sake.