Our garage has three doors with openers, and I was thinking about a way to use Insteon home automation to automate them. But, with an OSPi in the garage, this would potentially address this for much cheaper. The current sprinkler timer for the front yard is in the garage and only has four stations. So, a possible solution would be to use three unused outputs on the OSPi to control the doors and then use three open GPIO pins to connect to sensors (e.g. reed switches) to detect when the doors are open. To control the doors, the outputs could be wired in parallel with the manual pushbutton switches via 24V AC relays. As the output triacs could be controlled by HTTP GET commands, it would be possible to use the OSPi interval program daemon to control the doors. It would simply be necessary to provide a front end to deal with the GPIO sensors. It would also be possible to set up the program to send off an email or text message informing one that a door is open, which could be handy. It would obviously be important to not schedule those outputs in a program though. Having the garage doors open at 4:00 AM would not be a good thing. 😯
Actually, on the new OSPi board, there are four ADC inputs that could also be used for sensing. It might be interesting if Ray would consider developing an extension board with relays instead of triacs so it would be possible to control low voltage DC signals for this purpose. I agree that this could be a very handy extension of the OSPi’s functionality, especially considering that many have their sprinkler timers set up in the garage.