A few years ago, when we built our home, we didn’t give much thought to some basic equipment, such as our garage door openers. Whatever the builder proposed seemed affordable and sufficient at the time. We didn’t know whether those devices were smart, and honestly, we didn’t really care, since our cars used the HomeLink system. This protocol is owned by Gentex Corporation, which manufactures rearview mirrors for many vehicles and brands. Gentex sells these turnkey components to car manufacturers and compensates garage door opener providers for integrating HomeLink. Since 1995, this arrangement has worked out well for everyone. For more than three decades, HomeLink has evolved, particularly its encryption protocol (Triple-Frequency Security+ 2.0), which is recognized by the infamous yellow button. If you have one of these, you should be aware that basic and cheaper solutions for automating your garage door won’t work out of the box. Keep this in mind.
Another technology you may have heard of is myQ, owned by the Chamberlain Group. This is the software platform inside garage door openers that hangs from your ceiling. myQ requires a subscription and allows for automatic activation of your garage door, such as through geofencing. Fancy! In contrast, HomeLink is a manual operation system that requires someone or something to press the button to open or close the door. Of course, if you want to use myQ, you must choose a compatible opener. To complicate matters, opener manufacturers often promote their systems. For example, Genie promotes Aladdin Connect. By the end, you’ll find yourself faced with a variety of incompatible ecosystems: myQ, Aladdin Connect, Linear, SOMweb, maveo—you name it. What’s more, apart from the last two options listed, you depend on their corporate web servers and an internet connection to operate your door.
After exploring all these options and considering the corporate traps and potential issues associated with them, I decided to take a different approach to automate our existing Genie openers. Au diable! Why not use my Unifi network to drive the Genie 4064 models we own in parallel with the HomeLink system that we already use manually? And since the Unifi network can be bridged with Home Assistant, the possibilities are endless.
However, while that involved software, I needed to make our 4064 units smart. Fortunately, Ubiquiti has the perfect device for this project: the UniFi SuperLink Relay (when in stock, available here). This small relay can be powered using 12 or 48 VDC and has two inputs and two outputs—super simple! I looked up the wiring details for the Genie 4064 connection board to identify the terminals where the door safety sensors connect and, more importantly, the open/close wall buttons.
Since I don’t have the infamous yellow button, there’s no need to add another device to the relay. Less is more 😊 Our builder, as is customary in North America, used Ethernet cables to connect the wall buttons to the units (only using one pair of wires—I understand why they did it, but I hate it). The button terminals (#3 and #4 on the figure above) are the ones we need to connect to the COM and O1 (or O2; you can choose) of the relay. That’s all there is to it. However, as is often the case, practice proved more challenging than theory. The Genie’s terminal insertion mechanism is impractical, and the builder used short cables, leaving the Ethernet connections taking up all the space with little freedom to move and high risk of breaking the super-thin copper wires.
After fiddling around and struggling with loose connections, I used three-port WAGO wire connectors and flexible wiring to address this issue. Once that problem was solved, I simply programmed the relay to generate a short pulse (0.1s) when Output 1 (O1, in my case) is triggered via the UI or an automation. As with the entire Unifi ecosystem, you can use the alarm manager to trigger the relay in complex scenarios, such as when your vehicle’s license plate is recognized by one of your cameras. Best of all, there’s no subscription fee, no cloud or internet dependency, and no risk of future enshittification (read here; the video at the end is hilarious).
Voila! I thought I would share this information with anyone interested in a similar setup. Enjoy your weekend!