Home Assistant: Garage door status with Aqara Vibration Sensor

For almost two years ago, I wrote an article about controlling by garagedoor with the Qubino Flush 1D Relay.

I always had a plan to add some status-sensor to the garage door. I started with a 433MHz sensor, but it was never a success. It was hard to place a magnet-sensor and 433MHz is not the best option – so it took some time.

As I found out the Aqara Vibration Sensor had sensors for tilt, I thought that would be a great option. It is simple, but it was not straight forward.

The sensor was added in deCONZ running as an add-on, on my Home Assistant installed on a Intel NUC.

Finding the sensor position

With the Aqara on my desk, I tried different positions to find what I could use to set the status. Below you can se some of the numbers I wrote down while testing. The tiltangle was mostly useless, so i decided to use the last digits in orientation.

Button up (front facing me):
Lukket:		79 99 97  		
Åpen: 		 8 54 98 7

Lukket:		-1, 79, 10     -2, 79, 10      -2, 79, 10

Åpen: 		 3, 2, -86      3, 2, -86       3, 2, -86


Button up (front away from me):
Lukket:		84 71 5  23  75  79   9 360
Åpen: 		77 65 10  5 360 360 360 
 
Sideways (button up and back-left):
Lukket:		90 91 89
Åpen: 		89 86 90

Sideways (button up and back-right):
Lukket:		89 91 85
Åpen: 		89 85 85

Writing a template for the sensor

Using the Template-tab in Developer Tools, I could try and fail for how I would get the last digits from the orientation.

I ended up with a template like this:

  - platform: template
    sensors:
      garage_door_2_status:
        friendly_name: 'Garagedoor 2 status'
        value_template: >-
          {% if state_attr('binary_sensor.garasjeport_2_vib', 'orientation')[2] | int > 0 %}
            closed
          {% else %}
            open
          {% endif %}

This is added under sensor: in the configuration.yaml file. See the documentation here: https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/template/

Creating a cover-template

Cover-template is probably useless for this setup, as I can’t control the up or down. I can only trigger it to move. If it is up, it goes down – vice versa.

The only «advantage» with cover, is that you can have an icon to view the status of the port. You probably could the same without cover, but…

cover:
  - platform: template
    covers:
      garage_door_2:
        device_class: garage
        friendly_name: "Garagedoor 2"
        value_template: "{{ is_state('sensor.garage_door_2_status', 'open') }}"
        open_cover:
          service: switch.turn_on
          data:
            entity_id: switch.qubino_garagedoor_01
        close_cover:
          service: switch.turn_on
          data:
            entity_id: switch.qubino_garagedoor_01
        stop_cover:
          service: switch.turn_on
          data:
            entity_id: switch.qubino_garagedoor_01
        icon_template: >-
          {% if state_attr('binary_sensor.garasjeport_2_vib', 'orientation')[2] | int > 0 %}
            mdi:garage
          {% else %}
            mdi:garage-open
          {% endif %}

Source for the template was from this thread: https://community.home-assistant.io/t/template-cover-for-garage-door/241763/11, it’s mostly the same as the example in the documentation.

Documentation for Template Cover: https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/cover.template/

Some afterthoughts

The stop_cover part is optional and does not do anything for me, so I removed it. I left it in the example above so you can decide for yourself.

Garage door is probably written in two words? In Norwegian it is one word – so it is not consistent through the article 🙂