Garage Door Sensor

If you are like us then you can't actually see whether or not the garage door have been left open or not from the house. After the door getting left open one too many times for my liking I decided to try to do something about it.


Pretty much all it consists of is two 3.3V arduino mini's connected via a serial link over a pair of xbee radio modems. Much like the standard arduino, you need a special board to plug it into the arduino mini.

The sensor is fully self contained, sensing the door status and switching on power to the transmitter using a mercury tilt switch (I've had this sitting around for AGES, you can see it stuck to the inside of the left case in the picture above) The arduino's used are the 3.3V version, meaning that it can be powered by a pair of AA batteries.

The receiver is the same arduino mini, xbee connector board and xbee as in the sensor. the main difference is that is it hooked up to power permanently. The door status is indicated by a 10mm ultrabright LED. I included a 5V regulator in the case after blowing up the previous mini I was using. The arduinos all have a an on board voltage regulator, but the ones on the mini can only handle 12V maximum input, pity the first plug pack I hooked up to it was 18V ;_;
Result - one dead mini and one new keyring.


The 20C piece should give you some idea of just how small the mini arduinos are.

Yet another majorly over engineered solution to a simple problem. At least this one works.