Today I Learned
Short notes on things I've picked up along the way: data, cloud, tooling and the occasional detour.
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- TIL: Push the orange tab first (Garage Door Project, Part 5/5) Connecting the real garage door opener, putting a button on my phone, and making it reachable from outside the house.
- TIL: When the USB stick won't boot, boot the installer from the hard drive (Garage Door Project, Part 4/5) For a phone-friendly UI I wanted Home Assistant, and the Pi 1 is far too weak for it. Turning an old laptop into a server included a genuinely clever workaround.
- TIL: Turning an HTTP request into a relay click (Garage Door Project, Part 3/5) With the Arduino clicking on command and the Raspberry Pi finally reachable, it was time to connect them with a small Flask API.
- TIL: Getting a first-gen Raspberry Pi online is the hard part (Garage Door Project, Part 2/5) My Pi is a first-generation Model B: no Wi-Fi, two USB ports and a very old Raspbian. Getting it onto my network turned into the longest chapter of the project.
- TIL: A garage door button is just two wires touching (Garage Door Project, Part 1/5) I can open my garage door with a remote. I wanted to open it with an API call instead, and had no idea what electronics sit between "HTTP request" and "door moves".