Price: Low to HightPrice: Hight to LowName: A to ZName: Z to AIn Stock Allstar® 9921-288 Visor Remote Allstar® 9921-318 Visor Remote Allstar® 9931-288 Visor Remote Allstar® 9931-318 Visor Remote Allstar® Classic 318 Visor Remote Allstar® Classic 288 Visor Remote Allstar® MVP Visor Remote AWID® 26bit- Access Card Carper® 310 Keychain Remote Carper® 318 Keychain Remote Call (800) 284-2837 to Order. Most orders ship same day!How Remote Entry Works The two most common remote keyless-entry devices are: The fob that goes on your key ring to lock and unlock your car doors (Many of these fobs also arm and disarm a car alarm system.)The small controller that hangs off your car's sun visor to open and close the garage door Some home security systems also have remote controls, but these are not so common. The fob that you carry on your keychain or use to open the garage door is actually a small radio transmitter.
When you push a button on the fob, you turn on the transmitter and it sends a code to the receiver (either in the car or in the garage). Inside the car or garage is a radio receiver tuned to the frequency that the transmitter is using (300 or 400 MHz is typical for modern systems). The transmitter is similar to the one in a radio-controlled toy. See How Radio Works for details on radio waves and radio transmitters. In the very early days of garage door openers, around the 1950s, the transmitters were extremely simple. They sent out a single signal, and the garage door opener responded by opening or closing. As garage door openers became common, the simplicity of this system created a big problem -- anyone could drive down the street with a transmitter and open any garage door! They all used the same frequency and there was no security. By the 1970s, garage door openers had gotten slightly more sophisticated. You can see this level of sophistication in the photos below. The first shows a controller chip (black) and a DIP switch (blue).
A DIP switch has eight tiny switches arranged in a small package and soldered to the circuit board. By setting the DIP switches inside the transmitter, you controlled the code that the transmitter sent. The garage door would only open if the receiver's DIP switch were set to the same pattern. This provided some level of security, but not much. Eight DIP switches provide only 256 possible combinations. That's enough to keep several neighbors from opening each other's doors, but not enough to provide any real security. The transmitters in these circa-1970 garage door openers were also very simple: As you can see, the transmitter consisted of two transistors and a couple of resistors, and not much else. A two-transistor transmitter like this, powered by a 9-volt battery, is as simple as a radio transmitter gets. It's the same transmitter that you find in a $10 pair of low-power walkie-talkies. Remote-entry transmitters have gotten a lot more sophisticated since then. Let's take a look at a modern setup.
It seems like every few months we cover another garage door opener, and the concept is quickly becoming the “Hello World” of DIY home automation. In this installment, reader [ray] made his own garage door opener and chose the ESP8266 as the wireless interface of choice, but spiced the application up with an ultrasonic sensor that detects whether the car is in the garage and a web app that shows history, plus integration with Blynk for remote access. For posterity, he made the project open source as well. The video is well produced with lots of details and instructions, and the circuit board and assembly are refined and clean. It may be a “Hello World”, but it’s done right. Some of the other garage door hacks we’ve covered in the last year include the fingerprint scanner opener, the IM-ME opener, the motion-based security opener, the cat-enabled opener, the OpenCV Pi opener, and a Bluetooth Low Energy opener. [Gareth] had a friend who regularly forgot to close his garage door after parking his car and heading inside.
Since [Gareth] was familiar with basic electronics and an overall good pal, he offered to make a device that would indicate whether the garage door was open or not. The project starts off simple with an Arduino and ultrasonic distance sensor. Both are mounted to the ceiling of the garage with the ultrasonic sensor pointed down. When the garage door is open, the sensor outputs a shorter distance measurement than when the garage door is closed. Now that the system knows when the door is open or closed, the next part was sending a signal inside the house. He could have run a wire up through the house walls to an LED indicator but decided to go wireless with a 433mhz transmitter. There is a second Arduino inside equipped with a 433mhz receiver. When the garage door is open, the Arduino inside the house flashes an LED reminding the forgetful occupant to close the door. [Gareth] made all his code for both the sensor/transmitter and the receiver available on his site for anyone interested in making something similar.
Now here’s a really cool home hack. [Luis Rodrigues] has automated his garage door to open, simply by flashing his headlights at it. But wait, doesn’t that mean anyone could break into his house? At first we thought he had just added some photo-sensors and a bit of computer logic in order to turn a pattern of lights into an output to open the garage, but no, it’s actually specific to his car only. Which is awesome because if anyone ever tried to copy him to break in, all they break into is a very confused state of mind. You see how it actually works is the headlight output is connected to a control box under the hood of his car. A Moteino (RF Arduino variant) reads the input signal of the headlights flashing three times, and then communicates wirelessly to the garage door in order to open it. But [Luis] also has a gate outside his property — so if you hold the lights on for a second, both the garage door and the external gate will open as well. Opening a garage door by hand is a lot of work and a hassle, hence the advent of the garage door opener.
Nowadays, some people may even say just pushing the button of a remote control requires too much effort. [nodcah] is one of those people so he came up with a fingerprint scanner that controls a pre-installed garage door opener. All kidding aside, it is a cool project that lets you into your garaage, keeps unknown people out and doesn’t require you to remember to carry a key or remote. In the center of this project is an ATmega328 that runs a custom Arduino code. This ATmega328 is responsible for controlling a 16 character, 2 line LCD screen as well as communicate with an off the shelf fingerprint scanner from Sparkfun. The fingerprint scanner has a built in CPU, can store up to 20 fingerprints and does all its own processing of fingerprint scans. It then communicates to the ATmega328 with simple commands over serial Tx and Rx lines. The ATmega328, LCD and fingerprint scanner are all mounted outside the garage in a 3D printed enclosure. If the wires for the internal-garage open/close button were just run straight into this outdoor module, anyone could open it up, short the wires and get into the garage.
To prevent this, if the ATmega328 gets the ‘OK’ from the fingerprint scanner, then it sends a signal to an ATtiny85 that is inside the garage. If the ATtiny85 receives the correct signal, it will then actuate the garage door opener by shorting the open/close button contacts. This prevents anyone from sneaking into the garage. [nodcah] did a great service to the community by making all of the part list, schematics, instructions and Arduino code available so anyone can easily put this project together. Do it yourself garage door openers must be all the rage nowadays. We just got word of another take on this popular idea. [Giles] was commissioned by his friend to find a way to control the friend’s garage door using a smart phone. The request was understandable, considering the costly garage door remote and the fact that the buttons on the expensive remote tended to fail after a while. The inspiration for this project came from some YouTube videos of other similar projects.
Those projects all paired an Arduino with a Bluetooth headset in order to control the door from a mobile phone. [Giles] understood that while this would get the job done, it wouldn’t be very secure. Bluetooth headsets typically connect to mobile phones using a four digit PIN. Many of them have known default PINs and even if the default is changed, it wouldn’t take very long to guess a four digit PIN. [Giles] knew he had to find a more secure way. [Jason] really wanted to build an RFID controlled garage door opener and decided to turn to Arduino to get the job done. For someone who’s never worked with an Arduino before, he really seemed to know what he was doing. The Arduino acts as the brains of the operation while an off-the-shelf NFC/RFID reader module is used to read the RFID tags. To add new keys to the system, [Jason] simply swipes his “master” RFID key. An indicator LED lights up and a piezo speaker beeps, letting you know that the system is ready to read a new key.
Once the new key is read, the address is stored on an EEPROM. From that point forward the new key is permitted to activate the system. Whenever a valid key is swiped, the Arduino triggers a relay which can then be used to control just about anything. In this case, [Jason] plans to use it to control his garage door. The system also has a few manual controls. First is the reset button. If this button is held down for two seconds, all of the keys from the EEPROM are erased. This button would obviously only be available to people who are already inside the garage. There is also a DIP switch that allows the user to select how long the relay circuit should remain open. This is configurable in increments of 100ms. For now the circuit is wired up on a couple of breadboards, but it might be a good idea to use something more permanent. [Jason] could always take it a step further and learn to etch his own PCB’s. Or he could even design a board in Eagle CAD and order a real printed board.
Don’t miss the video description of the RFID system below. Vehicles with the highest level of trim package sometimes come with the ability to learn garage door opener codes. Less costly offerings lack that feature as well as others bells and whistles, leaving blank plates where fancy buttons would have been. [JiggMcFigg] makes the best of this situation by gutting his garage remote and hiding it behind a button blank. One thing that raised an eyebrow is the coin cell battery holder you can make out on the size-check image shown to the left. But really, these remotes must drain their batteries at a rate nearly the same as an unused battery so why complicate the hack? A holder was soldered onto the board, and jumper wires were soldered to the push button added to the blank plate. This type of utilitarian button is much more satisfying to use than those fancy-pants silk-screen molded-plastic types anyway! Of course you could go the other way with this hack. [JiggMcFigg] started out with the problem of losing the remotes in the mess of the car.