This is Technology Bytes, episode 31 for October 8th, 2023.
Technology Bytes is a microcast where I share brief bytes on interesting technology.
My name is Joel.
Enjoy, and here we go.
This week’s show may be a little bit short, but the latest technology that I’ve been playing with is a garage door attachment.
So it’s not an opener, it actually attaches to your current opener and connects to HomeKit so that it becomes a smart garage door opener.
It’s quite simple and works on very many different types and makes of garage doors because garage doors themselves are fairly simple.
Garage doors work on just a closed circuit.
You push the button on the wall, it closes the circuit, opens up the garage door, or if the garage door is open, then closes it.
And all the smart garage appliance, if you want to call it that, from Refos does is it just interrupts that circuit and takes over.
So when you say, hey lady, open up the garage door, then it closes that circuit and makes the garage door open.
It works really well.
It connected to HomeKit very simply.
It comes with a couple of sensors that let the appliance know if the door is open or closed and let you know that the operation was successful.
And it is not very expensive.
I think it was less than $50 on Amazon.
It’s from a company called Meross, M-E-R-O-S-S.
I’ve used a few of their HomeKit devices and they’ve all worked very, very well.
And this garage door appliance that attaches to your current garage door opener works just as well as the others.
As I mentioned, this device that connects to the garage door opener is easily connected to HomeKit.
And that’s the way that they’ve built it.
And it works with all automations and it lets you know if the door is open.
You can close it at certain times of day, like I do with lights and doors and other things that I have on the system.
It has so far responded quite well.
I had a little bit of difficulty with installation because my ladder was too short and I did not have a very good angle to do the wiring.
But I did finally get it together and didn’t break anything and everything seems to be working quite well.
It’s only been up for a little less than four days and I am currently happy with how it works.
So let me give you a couple of ideas that I had with automation.
So the way that my current home is set up, when I leave my front door, I am not walking into the garage door.
I do not have an entrance to the garage from my house.
So I have to go out my front door and then go in a little side door into the garage.
It’s just the way the complex is set up.
Other units have entrances right into their house, but mine does not.
And so what I do in the mornings is within a certain time frame, so it doesn’t happen all the time.
But when the front door is unlocked, that generally means my wife is on her way to work.
And so I have the garage people door unlock automatically because it’s on a smart system as well.
And then I have the garage door, the vehicle door, open up.
And so when the front door of the house is unlocked, the people garage door unlocks and the garage door opens.
All quite simple and neat.
And it works quite well.
And then a couple other automations that I set up.
So obviously when you leave home, at some point it knows you’re away from home and it says, do you want to run your away from home automation?
And that automation in my place turns off the appropriate lights, set the temperature to the appropriate settings.
It locks the front door, locks the people garage door, and then closes the vehicle garage door.
Or you can just tell it to do that from Siri as you’re driving away from the house.
And it all works quite well.
And then I set up another automation that when the garage people door is unlocked, then the garage vehicle door automatically opens.
Because most of the time, you know, more than 80%, when we unlock that garage people door, we are doing that to get into a car and go somewhere.
So we have that set up as well.
So it’s really quite fun to use.
I’m still working on its integration with CarPlay because I think it’s supposed to give me a button to do both of those things.
But I’m still trying to figure that part out.
I have some ideas.
But overall, I’m really impressed with Meross products.
They have a lot of different HomeKit products that are very reasonably priced.
And I’ve been happy with all that I have purchased from them.
And it works just as advertised.
So once again, that’s the Meross Garage Door Opener Appliance.
Turning your current garage door into a smart garage door.
It’s by Refoss, R-E-F-O-S-S.
And it works quite well.
And before I go today, just a little update on my level locks.
I ended up having to disconnect them from my entire HomeKit system, re-enable them, put them on the level lock system first so then I can connect them to HomeKit.
And that gives me some additional information like who left and who opened the locks and which person locked them.
It gives me touch capabilities so that when I close the door, I can just touch the outside of the level lock and it locks.
You can do that to unlock too, but I’m not super comfortable with that operation yet.
And they still work with all the automations.
And so I’m still fairly happy with them.
I don’t know the battery life yet because they’re still very new, just a couple of weeks old.
And I just wanted to give you that follow-up.
So that is all I have for today.
If you have comments or suggestions, you can send them to technologybytes, B-Y-T-E-S, at merigfamily.com.
And that’s M-E-A-R-I-G family.com.
And I will respond to those when I have a moment.
At this point, I’d just like to thank you for listening to the Technology Bytes microcast.
I look forward to the next time we are together taking another bite of technology.
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