NFC Garage Door Remote

My condo has a detached garage and it can only be accessed from the main garage door via a keychain remote. I’ve never been a fan of keys and considering that we live in a digital and automated world, I felt that there has to be a better way of operating my garage door.

While there’r many solutions to open your garage, I’ve felt that the simplest instruction of opening and closing a garage door should require the simplest of solutions; and while a simple remote effectively accomplishes the task, that is still one more remote I need to carry.

My solution was to build an NFC garage door opener using a Raspberry Pi connected to an RFID reader and a standard garage door remote At a high level: The Raspberry Pi stays on and saves a NFC key internally for validation. When it successfully reads and validates my NFC tag, it will send a signal to my garage door remote to open and close the garage just like a standard remote. In a more technical level: the garage door remote is modified in two ways. First, the button programmed to the garage door opener is soldered to an always-on state. Think of it as if the button is always pressed. The battery is removed in place of two wires soldered to the positive and negative points. The wires are then connected to the Raspberry Pi where the Pi would deliver power to the remote after validating the NFC tag from the reader.

There’r several advantages to this approach compared to what the market offers. Mainly, it did not require any network technologies that can fail. It also feels redundant to have any networking capabilities just so I can have Siri to misinterpret what I’m trying to do to close my garage door. But mainly, it’s really cool to have built a system like this myself!