12.8 Proximity Garage Door Opener

As you approach your garage with your GPS-enabled smartphone, the phone triggers a request to open the garage door. This relays to Arduino-XBee hardware attached to your garage door’s RF-transmitting garage door opener, which in turn transmits the request to the automatic garage door receiver and opens the door.

Sans the GPS feature, opening a garage door from a smartphone like the Android or iOS device is a very popular DIY project, and a number of videos doing this have been posted on YouTube. Since your garage is a fixed location, the GPS values for latitude/longitude/elevation will remain static. By extending the Rails server we wrote in Chapter 7, ​Web-Enabled Light Switch​, writing the smartphone application that extends the toggle functionality of the garage door opening and closing based on your location shouldn’t be too difficult.