Connecting my dumb garage and car's homelink buttons to Home Assistant
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Hi all, I've been on parental leave and while working on my garage door, I thought to myself... it would be great to open up this garage door from my phone without having to buy a bunch of expensive stuff.That snowballed into, I want the garage door buttons on my car's rear view mirror to trigger automations in home assistant.I went down a bit of a hardware rabbit hole and wrote a little writeup of my journey and a how-to.It's my first piece of public technical writing so I'm open to any feedback!
HN · launched Jul 23, 2026 · 11 upvotes (top 42%) · 0 views
Niche: smart home automation software · 107 launches, 6 in the last 7 days ▼ -33% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Workflow automation
- Prosumer
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 107 launches in smart home automation software →
Could you build this?
No This is a custom hardware, RF engineering, and physical wiring DIY project involving soldering, relays, RF receivers, and physical garage mechanisms rather than standalone software.
What it would actually take: The project requires physical hardware integration: wiring low-voltage dry contact relays (e.g., Zooz Zen16 multi-relay) to physical garage opener terminals, installing magnetic reed switches for physical state detection, and interfacing RF receivers (Liftmaster 850LM) via Z-Wave to a Home Assistant gateway. The hard parts are electrical safety, RF signal sniffing/pairing with Security+ protocols, and hardware debugging. It requires physical tools, electronics experience, and home automation hardware setup.
Discussion
No comments on this launch.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 110 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #33 of 111 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 163 days after the earliest competitor.
- Itsyhome · hn · 2026-02-10 · 57 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- VisionState · github · 2026-09-28 · 15 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Apple Carplay for Android Auto · ph · 2026-10-14 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- SeerrHA · github · 2026-09-18 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- Versatile Garage Doors Repair & Service · ph · 2026-09-19 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- panasonic-doorphone-connect · github · 2026-09-17 · 18 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- Otto · ph · 2026-09-22 · 3 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- hyper-hinge · github · 2026-09-10 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.39
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