Raspberry Pi Pico W Garage Door Sensor

I wanted to build a sensor to determine the state of my garage door—open or closed—and send that state to Home Assistant so I can display the status in a dashboard and build automation from it (e.g. warning me if I'm asleep and the garage door is open!).

If I wanted some sort of cloud integration, I could pay for the kit that connects to my garage door opener, but since the cloud is just someone else's computer, and I'd rather not rely on some company's weak security to protect data about my home... I want it all local.

Setting up the Pico W

I decided to use a Raspberry Pi Pico W for this project—you could probably also use an ESP32 or ESP8266 just as easily, since this project uses ESPHome.

You will have to flash the firmware to the Pico W in order for it to work.

Note: I also have a MicroPython-based setup in the micropython subdirectory.

Using Docker

Note: This will not work until this Pull Request is merged into ESPHome.

In this directory, I run docker-compose up -d to start an esphome container that I'll use to flash the Pico.

Then enter the container:

$ docker exec -it esphome bash
root@docker-desktop:/config#

This drops you into the container inside the config directory, which is shared from the config directory in this repository.

TODO.

Using pip source install

For now, until support for the Pico is merged into ESPHome, you have to install a forked version with support for the Pico. Make sure you have Python 3 installed on your computer, then run:

$ pip3 install git+https://github.com/jesserockz/esphome.git@rp2040

Make sure your installation is working:

$ esphome version
Version: 2022.7.0-dev

Then plug in your Pico W, while holding the BOOTSEL button, and when it mounts on your computer, run:

$ esphome run garage-door.yml --device /Volumes/RPI-RP2

After 20-30 seconds, ESPHome should compile and upload the firmware to the Pico.

Note: There's also an led-blink.yml configuration if you want to upload it quickly to verify esphome and your Pico are all wired up correctly. If you run that file, it should make your Pico start blinking it's onboard LED 2x per second.