The garage door monitor that I built earlier in the year has by all accounts been running perfectly since I installed it. Recently I implemented a couple of new features that I’ve wished for over the last few months.
The first new feature is a bit more visibility into the state of the system. I added uptime and memory info to the web page:
The second and more practical addition is a subsequent notification when the door is closed again after it was left open for longer that the trigger time (5 minutes).
Since I set up the garage door monitor I haven’t accidentally left it open. However, I have triggered the notification when washing the car or packing for a road trip. It’s this latter scenario that I wanted to address. The issue is that because the notification is triggered during packing if I did set off and forget to close the door I wouldn’t know. One way to deal with this would be recurring notifications. I chose another option though.
When the door is closed after notifying that it was left open, it sends another message saying that it’s now closed. The benefit of this approach is that the message log now properly tracks the state of the door, so if I’m a few kms down the road and wonder if I closed the door it’s just a matter of checking the channel in Mattermost.
Before I powered it off to update the Buildroot image on the SD card I hooked up a serial console and checked its uptime. I was pleased to see 100% uptime since it was first installed:
02:03:14 up 183 days, 20:26, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
That’s all for now, on to the next few hundred days of service!