Hey everyone! I’ve been using my Garadget for years and honestly love this little piece of hardware. I know this board isn’t visited much these days, but I wanted to give back what I could.
I put together a new Homebridge plugin: homebridge-garadget-cloudmqtt.
Full disclosure, this was heavily AI-assisted (vibe-coded with Claude), so take that for what it’s worth. That said, it’s working well for me and addresses some pain points I had with the existing options.
My original problem was that I kept getting Obstruction Detected in HomeKit. When I looked at the logs it said invalid credentials, but if I restarted my Homebridge Docker container it would start working again, which didn’t make sense to me. I thought maybe it was a Particle server issue. Turns out the old plugin was reporting “token expired” for any API failure at all, including plain old network blips. A restart would clear the transient error and it would work fine again.
What’s different:
- Local MQTT support: Works without internet. If your connection goes down, you can still open your garage. Uses your local MQTT broker (Mosquitto, Home Assistant, etc.)
- Cloud + MQTT mode: You can run both simultaneously so the Garadget app keeps working alongside Homebridge
- Real-time updates: Door state changes push to HomeKit instantly instead of waiting for a poll, so notifications fire when the door actually moves
- Automatic device info: Firmware version and serial number are pulled from the device and shown in HomeKit
- Optional light sensor: Exposes the Garadget’s built-in light sensor as a HomeKit accessory
- Better error handling: The old plugin would report “token expired” for any error including network blips. This one actually distinguishes between the two
- Config UI: Includes a Homebridge UI form so you don’t have to hand-edit JSON
Install: Search homebridge-garadget-cloudmqtt in the Homebridge plugin store
Feedback welcome, especially from anyone who knows the Garadget MQTT implementation better than I do!