We moved into a house with two garages this year and my goal is to gradually make our home as smart as possible. I would like to use HomeKit primarily because it works locally. But since HomeKit components are quite expensive, Homebridge was another issue for me. During my research and also here in the blog, I came across Home Assistant. I’ve now jumped on the bandwagon and after installing a Raspberry Pi, the platform is now running on a NUC. The next step is to add the Zigbee components to the sky-Connect dongle, but that’s a topic for another post.
This is about the smart garage door opener from meross, which is available with and without HomeKit. I use one with and one without HomeKit (in the end everything ends up in HomeKit via Home Assistant anyway) and I would like to briefly share my experiences with you. If you decide on the part, you get the controller itself, which already has a long USB cable and the cable for connecting to the motor control installed. You will also receive a sensor cable with a 2-pin connection to the controller, the counterpart to the sensor, a USB power supply and some fastening material.
The installation is relatively easy, as long as you can access the motor control of your garage door without any problems. meross supports various models of gates/motors, but if you generally have a button to open that is connected to the controller with two wires, then it should work. Which brings us to the topic. Before you unscrew the motor controller, make sure the fuse is out. Now look at where the two cables of your button come from and in which inputs of the control they are clamped. You clamp the meross controller (blue/brown wire) to the same inputs. Before you screw everything together, it is best to test.
So switch on the fuse, connect the meross controller to the network via USB. It should flash green/yellow and be found in the meross app. Then select the WLAN of the controller and let it guide you through the installation of the app. Immediately afterwards, the opener appears in the simple interface and you can try out whether the commands are sent correctly to the controller. Worked for me.
Also tests whether the button still works. It is always a good idea to take a picture of the original clamp before changing anything. Incidentally, I find that the hard-wired USB cable could be longer. Here you have to work with an extender if necessary. But you are not finished with the installation, because you still have to mount the gate sensors. With these, the controller recognizes whether the garage door is closed or open.
You simply look for a suitable place on the frame and on the gate where you can attach the sensor. The counterparts must not be more than 2 centimeters apart. The sensor can either be glued with the double-sided adhesive tape or fixed with the screws provided. As usual, the HomeKit version is integrated into Apple Home by scanning the code. In my case it worked without any problems.
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From here there is actually not much to mention, because the gate is now reliably opened or closed in the app or in Apple Home. You can still make a few settings, such as setting an alarm when the gate is closed. This lets children know, for example, to get out of the way when the gate is closing. So far I haven’t noticed any failures of the controller. If you use CarPlay, you can see the garage door directly on the dashboard as soon as you get close to home. By pressing the display, the gate is already opened and you can easily drive in. You can also set automations in Apple Home to automatically close or open the gate under certain circumstances. Both versions of the opener (with or without HomeKit) can be integrated into Alexa or Google Home.
A few more words about integration into Home Assistant. To do this, you first have to install a custom integration via the HACS. There are two for meross, I chose meross LAN (here the GitHub repo). If the whole thing is installed, the opener should be recognized in the auto-discovery. If not, simply select “Meross LAN” in the integration menu and follow the wizard. You can have the token for the gate opener obtained automatically via the meross registration. From now on you will see the open with its entities and you can integrate it into your dashboard accordingly.
A brief summary of the opener: meross offers a solid garage door opener without a lot of frills for 45 euros, which can be used on all smart home platforms. So far I haven’t had any disconnections or other errors to report. So if you are currently looking, then take a look at the device.
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