As part of my home automation fun, I had a MyQ module paired to my garage door opener, which “wifi enabled” the opener. Once that was set up, I leveraged a plugin in Homebridge to talk to the MyQ API and present the door in Apple Homekit.
Why does it need an API? The MyQ devices dont have any “local” connectivity, so you HAVE to use the MyQ service API to talk to it.
Naturally being a commercial product, they didn’t like third party apps using their precious service, so after a long stretch of the plugin developer trying to constantly fix the monkey wrenches, they disabled that plugin’s ability to talk to their API completely, hence disabling the Homebridge setup.
Well, there’s other options, including that of the Meross Smart Garage Door opener remote. The remote word here is a bit of a stretch, as its basically a box that: pushes/trips your garage door opener “button”, and has its own sensor to detect the status of the door. Pretty simple, and should work with nearly all openers, right? Riiight?
To quickly explain how a pushbutton works on most openers, they’re simply a button, often simliar to a doorbell button, with 2 wires going to them. When you press the button, the two wires are “shorted”, or connected together, to trigger the opener. While the button is not being pressed, the wires just exist, not connected to each other.
Ok, so jump back to my question – would the Meross module work with most openers? Well, mostly. Unfortunately, some garage door openers, such as mine, do have a pair of wires coming off of them going to a switch, but that switch is actually a smart control panel with a little display showing temperature and other info. That means the pair of wires not only provide power to that little panel, but shorting them will not cause the opener to open; if anything, it’ll just kill power to the little panel.
But not all hope is lost – the panel itself DOES have a pushbutton, right? So somewhere inside is still a tiny doorbell like switch that just connecting two points, so while they don’t make it easy to connect up a standard pushbutton, anyone with even a basic knowledge of electronics can find the button, connect up their own wires to it, and use an external button, or in this case, the Meross module, to trigger the opener to open.
My opener panel looks like the one above, with that top gray area the button that opens the door. In order to remove the panel off the wall, you have to carefully pry up on the button of that top button, and it should pop off, revealing the mounting screw. Once the button is off, you’ll notice two tiny “squares” behind it too, with round tips. Those are the pushbuttons that you’re actually pressing when you open the door from the panel, and all they do is connect two legs together. If we can access those “legs”, we can connect other buttons up to them in parallel.
As with everything electrical, please use caution when working on this stuff; there should be no high voltage outside of your actual opener unit, but please use caution and follow this at your own risk.
After turning off power to the opener, and removing the panel from the wall, it reveal two simple screw terminals on the back where the two wires connect to. Take a picture or make a note as to which one (red or white) goes where, and remove the two wires. Now the panel is free for…activities.
The back of the unit is protected with a simple cardboard insulator, and with the pushbuttons on top, it was trivial to just fold down the cardboard piece and access the back of the pushbuttons. Since I noticed a wire slot on the right side of the unit, I opened to connect a thin pair of wires I cut off an old ac adapter to it. The back of the pushbutton will have 4 legs; you only need 2, and in my case, it was one of the top legs, and one of the bottom legs. You’re mileage may vary (if the legs are already shorted, thats the wrong pair).
I carefully added a tiny bit of solder to two of the legs, then tinned the wire and trimmed it back to barely any wire exposed (about 1mm). I then soldered the wires to the two legs. It doesn’t matter which wires go where, as they’ll simply be connected together when the Meross module (or external button or whatever you’re using) triggers the door.
Unfortunately I didn’t take an after picture, but I cleaned up, re-installed the panel carefully routing my new wire pair out of that little slot you see in the pic above, and turned the opener back on. Now if I connect the two wires together manually, the door is trigger to open or close. GREAT! If I just wanted an external pushbutton, well just connect any generic doorbell button to the two wires, and you’re done.
If you’re using the Meross or some other module, simply follow the instructions that came with the module, connecting your two “button” wires to the wires you connected.