I was excited to get my Garadget today but was a little nervous about the wiring part. Surprisingly I breezed through it and got to open and close my door with my phone in relatively short order. I declared success and when I came back to the house and looked at my phone a few minutes later it showed my garage door open. I went to check and it was closed.
This led me down the road of fiddling with the laser and the positioning of the reflective tag. I read some of the posts here and tried some of the suggestions but no matter what I did (change scan period, threshold, moved tag around, no tag, turned lights off, etc.) my “Reflection” shows as 0 in the app. I got it to go to 4 a few times, sometimes when I put my finger over the sensor, but that’s obviously not good enough. For what it’s worth I do see the light blink faster when I change intensity and the door can be controlled via the app so it’s connected, just not getting a reading.
With the windows where they are I initially tried putting the reflective pad in between but the red safety cord was getting in the way (and even if I got it out of the way for the sake of testing it wasn’t giving me a good reading) I’ve tried going high, low, left, and right with it and not gotten anywhere. I’m not sure what I’m missing or why it’s not getting a good enough reflection reading and am open to any help or suggestions as without a reliable reading being able to open and close the door is not that exciting.
Welp, false alarm. I tried the toilet paper roll trick I saw someone else do and got up to 98%, removed it and it’s stayed that way for the last 30 minutes or so. Not sure what did it exactly but it’s looking good and the status seems to be accurate. Plus, got HomeAssistant all setup:
For those that are wondering what the toilet paper roll is all about see below. When the top row of the garage door is windows and the reflector is placed near the windows to much ambient light washes out the laser light so the receiver can’t notice it. Put the reflector a full row below the windows (no affect on the reflector works from any angle) and slide a paper towel or toilet roll onto the end of the garadget to reduce the ambient light.
The screenshot above is from home automation integration.
If you use the regular mobile apps or web app, then you can find the same information in settings page.
Thanks for the super quick response. I just set my unit up (on several Android devices), & I notice the picture on the app shows the state (open or closed) last activated by the app until it’s reset. In other words, when I manually open or close the door, I get an email alert that it happened, but the app’s “home” page doesn’t change until I exit & restart. Is there something I’m missing? Thanks in advance.
You can pull the screen down for the manual refresh.
The update in the web app should be very responsive, mobile apps are due for some TLC which they’ll get soon.
The PC web page was quite responsive. Not so much for the Android apps: on 1 galaxy the pulling down didn’t change anything, on another it just hung with no picture re status. Exiting & restarting seems thge only way to go. How long until the update? And speaking of updates, here’s 1 that should be helpful: create an “Away” alert–when activated, if the door opens, a TEXT alert (or a second email to a text address) would be sent (and the user would turn this off upon return (principally from extended absences). That’s the prime reason I bought this–if I’m away on business or vaction and my door open’s for some reason, I really want to know.
I’ll be visiting with app developers in June and hope to make good progress on app improvements.
Re. alerts: it sounds like you’re describing the state alerts. When you leave on vacation just enable open alert in “alerts” screen.
This would not be a normal “open”. It would send an alert to a DIFFERENT address than the standard every day alert address (here, my regular email). As with my home security system, normal activity goes to my email (as here). A fire or break-in alert also goes to my texts, which causes a siren alarm to go off on my phone to get my attention (which everyday emails do not). That way the unusual opening when the user is away from home would get special attention.
So you solution appears to be to just change the alert address while I’m away? Not nearly as convenient as just a click to activate a new alert type, but as a workaround it’s do-able. However, looks like everything’s offline. Is that at my end or yours?
You can configure everyday alerts to be delivered as push notifications in the mobile app and for the time of travel configure email alerts via the web app. The feature you’ve described is something to be considered, but so far it’s the first request of this kind so it will have a few other features ahead of it on the todo list.
Re. offline: currently there’s no service interruption, if your unit is offline, please try resetting it. You can find the connection troubleshooting steps in the guide here. Please don’t hesitate to contact me for help if the connection issues persist.
