Where are the buttons? The button you press on the outside of the enclosure either pushes a mechanical-electrical button inside OR just shorts two of the pads. Can you figure out what happens at the board-level when you push the button on the outside of the remote?
Sorry, should have made that more clear. The buttons of the remote correspond to the circles, as shown here
When I put one end of a wire on one of the circles, without putting the other end of the wire on the other circle, the door opens. Which makes me think it’s mechanical rather than electrical. But I don’t know…
Are there 3 buttons on the outer enclosure, or 6? I'd guess that one half of each circle is internally connected to a ground plane on the board, and each row may be redundant such that you can short either side of a top/bottom circle. Do you have a multimeter that you could use to check for low impedance paths between the button contact points, the battery terminals, and different points on the board? That would help you visualize the electrical layout and functionality.
3 buttons. The 3 oval buttons correspond to the 3 red ovals in the picture.
Yup, I can do that....
Just to cover all bases here, have you tried shorting the connection terminals on the GDO itself where the wall switch goes in? If that short works, then you can connect the relay there without having to involve a (dumb) remote.
ETA - My super bare-bones / very old LiftMaster died last month, so I had a Genie 2128 installed (it's a pretty basic model in the Genie line)... It says it has Alladin Connect built-in, but I haven't even looked into it -- I'm just not interested. As soon as it was installed, first thing I checked was shorting the wall switch - that worked, so I just reconnected my Zen 17 just like I had it for the dumb ol' LiftMaster -- works like a champ.
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I guess one downside to that is that it will take two zen17 rather than just one right? For two garage doors that is.
The zen17 has two relays, correct? You should be able to use it for two doors if closing the contact between points on the remote works. If they're redundant in the same row, you only need to connect one side.
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For two garage doors, using the remote would only require one zen17. Shorting at the GDO itself would require two zen17, at least assuming I’m not going to run wire halfway across the garage. Right?
Oh, got it. How far apart are the openers? I'd put the switcher either in the middle or close to one and then just run the wires to the openers from there. You can make it look "good enough" for a garage pretty easily if that is your concern.
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That's a good point - the possibility of it all being in a finished garage occurred to me after my last post, so I can understand the aesthetical apprehension about stringing wires, straddling openers etc - the dumb remote tie-in is a nice option for that.
I generally pursue a hard-wired / mains-powered solution when possible, but like it or not, that just ain't always the best way to go.
Just wanted to give a heads up, i have a genie garage door as well, and for the wall mounted GDO, i found the following resistance values work with the hard wired button controller:
203.3 ohms (light button pressed)
0.3 ohms open/close (shorting the wires together)
1.5 M Ohm ( no buttons pressed, effectively an open state)
82.4 Ohm locked (GDO lock switch set to lock)
So if you want to use all features per garage door, you would need 3 relay contacts:
- one with a 203 ohm resisitor in series to trigger the light
- One with no resistor to open/close
- One with a 83 Ohm resistor in series.
Relays 1 & 2 would need to be set to reset back to open state after 1 second to simulate a button press
Relay 3 would need to be set as a toggle to simulate a switch being toggled
I have this setup on my garage door with a zooz zen 16
Just figure out which cable goes to the button, then see which terminals on the opener that it connects to. Then try shorting those with a single wire.
If that works, you should be able to connect a controlled relay in parallel (connected to same terminals as the opener button currently connects to, so that either can be used).
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Yep, what @tomw says... I'm gonna guess slots 3 & 4, since it looks like double wires are going in 1 & 2, so I suspect those are from the two (floor-level) eye sensors .
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Thanks. I'll try shorting those terminals. In the meantime, I guess I'll try out the cloud integration (might as well). Does it require tilt sensors? Looking at the code, it seems like it gets the door open/close status from the cloud. Has that proven reliable?
I think you are back to actually talking about my Aladdin Connect integration for Hubitat, correct?
Everything was self-contained as far as I could tell. If the particular Aladdin setup had sensors or other inputs for its implementation with the official app, then the statuses from those would show up in the APIs that I used.
@craigspree was the most detailed tester and could comment on any gotchas. Also, there's more discussion in this thread on the various features and debugging: Is it possible to use RM4 to control/report on my Genie Aladdin Garage (based on Postman success)? - #6 by tomw
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Hi @tomw ,
Thank you for creating this integration with HE. I have been using it for over a year and been loving it. Within the last week, I have a strange issue where the garage door device (nested inside the Aladdin Connect system) stopped working. My user and password are still valid because I get a "good" commStatus on the connect system device when I send a refresh command.
My problem is on the component device door. I get unknown for battery, door, and rssi. Also when I send a close or open command, I get a commStatus: error. Below is what I get from the debug log. Not sure where to start to resolve this, but if you have time to point me in the right direction, I would greatly appreciate it.
Thanks
dev:292022-02-23 04:56:40.292 pm debugclose() failed: Cannot invoke method getAt() on null object
dev:292022-02-23 04:56:30.295 pm debugopen() failed: Cannot invoke method getAt() on null object
I have a new version in work for the cloud changes that are rolling out to some people's systems. I sent you a PM to see if you want to test out the new code.
Thank you. Yes, I would be interested in trying it out
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