Garage Door Control + Alexa

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Hey everyone,

I just did my first project with Hubitat!

What I did:

  • Installed the Zooz multi-relay with three tilt sensors.

  • Setup the garage door opener app by @krlaframboise. Excellent app and very clear instructions! Thank you!

  • Setup Alexa notification of when a garage door opens using the app by @tonesto7. Another great app with clear instructions!

Now to my question:
I wanted to be able to ask Alexa if a garage door was open.

What I ended up doing was:

  • Create a virtual switch on Hubitat.

  • Setup an Alexa Routine where when I asked "Check the garage doors", it would turn the switch "on".

  • A trigger would fire based on the switch turning on and would reset (off) the switch, check to see if any of the garage door sensors were on. If so, send a notification to Alexa that a garage door is open. If not, then say all are closed.

As much as I am proud to have figured this out, Just want to do this with as little workarounds as possible.

I have to think there is an easier way to do this without virtual switches.
Anyone have any thoughts on how?

Thanks!

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Virtual switches are exactly how I set mine up as well

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Contact sensors are now supported by Alexa. So, if you tied your tilts into virtual contact sensors or modified the driver so they had both capabilities, you could sync those to Alexa and then you'd be able to ask if they were open.

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There are 2 different ways to do this already built into the app so there's no need to use virtual switches or make any changes to the driver...

  1. The garage door device it creates supports the contact sensor capability so if you add it to Alexa she'll see it as a contact sensor and you can ask her if it's open or closed.

  2. Enable the Virtual Lock setting within the app which will create a lock child device. You can add that lock child device to Alexa and check if it's locked (closed) or unlocked (open). This also supports the PIN feature so you'll be able to lock (close) and unlock (open) the door from Alexa.

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@sharmaz Iā€™d recommend doing it @krlaframboise way...if only virtual garage doors showed up as garage doors in alexa

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I'm using the @krlaframboise drivers with the Zooz relay along with Alexa, the built-in virtual lock works great with Alexa. Just ask her "Alexa, is the garage door locked"; works every time. I also use this lock on my dashboards (one is on my Android car stereo to open and close the garage door from blocks away from home).

Thank you again @krlaframboise, excellent work!

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Thanks everyone. One of things I want to solve is that my current solution announces the state of the garage doors back to ALL Alexas as it won't know which Alexa is asking. Also, what I want to keep is I want to ask if "any" garage door is open since I have three of them.

I'll look at the mentioned solutions to see if I can get them to work! Finding this is pretty fun stuff. In fact, I may be getting the "bug" to learn some of this coding myself! "Bug"... get it? Ha Ha Ha :slight_smile:

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@sharmaz never a bad idea to learn to code ... it sure does help.
Instead of your virtual switch you should make a virtual garage door. In alexa it will show up as a contact sensor. @John.Herron you should use the virtual garage door in your car dashboard instead. @sharmaz create a virtual lock like @John.Herron said and use that for alexa only. So you can ask is the garage door open like any other garage door. To open and close the garage door, just say lock and unlock the garage door. If you want to see if any garage door is open or close them all at once, create another virtual garage door and lock. Instead of having this duplicate from a real garage door, create a rule that if any are open open the garage door and if all are closed close it. Then use mirror me to create an automation that mirrors your individual garage doors to the new garage door combo.

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I just created a virtual garage and now can just ask Alexa if it's open. Deleting my Alexa routine, virtual switch and the rule for them. Much cleaner! I'll have to look into the virtual lock part at some point.

Thanks!

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Soon

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You said you're using the Zooz Garage Door Opener app and that app automatically creates a virtual garage door device for each door so why are you creating new virtual devices instead of using the ones that app already created for you?

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Hey there.
Perhaps I'm doing this wrong. But I wanted to ask Alex if "any" garage door was open. So the virtual switch I setup turns on or off based on a rule I set that checks if any of the three garage door switches are on:

image

Then I just add my single virtual switch to Alexa and am able to ask if the Garage is open or closed. I just need to know if any door is open, not really which one specifically.

Both Hubitat and Alexa is new to me. Am I missing some other functionality in Alexa or the Zooz Garage App to make this even easier?

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Thanks for explaining, I missed the "any" part of your use case.

You're correct, to find out if any doors are open you need to use a virtual device and your rule that syncs it looks fine.

I thought that if you put all the garage door devices into a "garage" group in the Alexa app then you could ask if any doors were open in the garage and she'd list them, but I was thinking of Google Home and it turns out that feature only supports lights so that wouldn't have worked with Google Home either...

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