I love the Garadget and I’m super excited about it.
Here are some defects I think I’ve noticed in the app and some feature requests.
Defects
the app notifies me three times on any open and close.
the text doesn’t wrap when viewing the community site on the help page. This makes it unreadable on my 6S+
sometimes the animation doesn’t correspond with the actual state of the door.
Feature requests
not sure of what the functionality is supposed to be here, but the geolocation only notifies me how far away I am from my garage. If that is all it is supposed to be, I’ll turn it off. It doesn’t really explain what it is for. What would be COOL is if it OPENED the door when I came in range of the door. Not just to cycle it. I don’t want it to close when I get close if it is already open.
Auto close after a certain time of day
lock out other open and close through remotes (not sure if this would be helpful or not).
if garage doesn’t close due to tripping of the safety feature, notification of this reason. I want to know that I can try to close it again or if I need to go have it checked.
Loren, Thanks for your report and ideas.
You mentioned 6S+, I’m assuming we’re talking about iPhone and your app feedback pertains to iOS version.
I’d like to look into multiple notifications situation as this should not be happening. Please PM me your login name and I’ll check the notification subscriptions on my end.
I’m looking at community board on my iPhone 6S and the content appears to be mobile friendly (wrapping/scaling etc). I’ll need more info on how you view the content.
Animation of of sync was already on developer’s fix list. This should be resolved in coming releases.
Location function is supposed to notify you if the door is open while you’re leaving the selected area. Please report if this doesn’t work as expected. Please keep in mind that to conserve the battery, app uses low power location services based on WiFi networks and mobile towers handovers. This means that the event may not trigger at the exact time you cross the red line.
Automatic door motion smells like liability. With home automation hubs integration it is possible to set the rules for timeout handling. There’s probably an IFTTT recipe that would allow location based trigger. These are popular requests and I’ll keep looking into it.
If garage reversed while closing, the sensor will not confirm the closed status within expected time and you’ll see “stopped” state. There is no way however for Garadget to know the cause. Maybe camera enabled Garadget in the future?
I too typically get 3 notifications for each open or close event. Attached are all the IFTTT notifications for a single open event followed by a single close event. (I also enabled Garadget mobile app (iOS) notifications, but none was sent.)
something reflective in the path of the laser trips the sensor when the door moves
We can address the first one by deactivating all the notifications one by one each time giving the app time to sync and then logout, login and activate event notifications one by one
For the second one we can (at least temporarily for testing) increase the threshold setting - that the value of reflection above which the door is considered closed. If there’s something mildly reflective that laser hits on the door the reflection rate may go over the threshold and then back on the next scan creating additional events.
Please try above solutions and let me know if the issue still persists.
Thank you for those suggestions. Really appreciate your quick response.
I’ve performed both, including upping the threshold from 15 to 30%. I’ll test the changes tomorrow during the day, when there may be light reflections affecting the sensor.
You’re very welcome.
The unwanted reflection to which I referred is not from the ambient light, but rather from Garadget’s own laser bouncing on things like a metal hinge passing by or the safety release rope when the door moves. You don’t need the ambient light to test this scenario.
If duplicate notifications are not caused the unwanted reflection and fixed otherwise, I would return the threshold back to 15.
where the bottom 3 are for the open event and the top 3 are for the subsequent close event.
The safety release rope is to the right of the path of the laser, so that shouldn’t be in the way. But, that metal bar at the top of the door and below the reflective pad may be the cause:
Thanks for the picture, this helps a lot.
In this setup, as the metal bar gets closer, it doesn’t even have to have very high of the reflection to trip the sensor. See if covering it with some tape will take care of it, this way you can keep the threshold where it was.
Ok, please see if steadily increasing threshold setting will completely solve the issue.
At least now we know it’s stray reflection related and not caused by duplicate push notifications delivery.
