After getting a new car, [Solo Pilot] missed the automatic garage door opening and closing system their old car had. So they set about building their own, called GarageMinder. On the project page you will find a bill of materials, schematics, and some notes about the approach taken in various versions of the software. [Solo Pilot] also made the software available.

The basic hardware centers around a Raspberry Pi Zero W, but there are plans to switch to an ESP32. From the car side of things there are built-in continuous Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) advertisement broadcasts, which the Raspberry Pi can detect. Building a reliable system on top of these unreliable signals is difficult and you can read about some of the challenges and approaches that were taken during development. This is a work in progress and additional techniques and approaches are going to be trialed in future.

If you’re interested in Bluetooth garage door openers be sure to read about using a Bluetooth headset as a garage door opener for your Android device.