Intro

Greetings, people!

I’m sure you know that smart house concepts are no longer a novelty, and smart devices take a significant part of our lives. It is mainly made possible by The Internet of things (IoT) networks which connect various electronic devices. With the IoT, you can automate your house with the smart temperature and humidity controllers, or remotely control lights, kettle, or even vacuum cleaner. Based on the trend of popularity, each house will become smart soon.

Of course, a smart home can be bought. However, I think it is better to make it smart by yourself, isn’t it? Nowadays, there are many different applications which allow anyone unfamiliar with electronics or programming to implement their ideas. In my opinion, it’s easier to understand the details of the topic while doing everything from scratch. Besides, the result will be much more valuable.

It's time for me to figure out how it works. For this, I decided to create an automated garage and describe the process in this article. In a fact, I have no spare garage, so i decided to build a smart garage model from the toy building.

Those who are unfamiliar with programming can find this article very useful because I’ll tell how to make it work without writing a single line of code.

Let me share the experience.

Workpiece

It’s a two-story building made of wood. The garage occupies the ground floor, and there is a workshop on the second floor. In front of the building, there are three garage gates. On the opposite side, the building has a lift to the workshop and two additional entrances. The blue door leads to the workshop from the roof of the garage. The workshop roof can be opened to access inside. All gates in the garage open up.

This toy has a lot of moving parts, and it is large and inexpensive. In my opinion, it is ideal to practice the process of a smart house model creation.

Idea

First of all, the garage needs to get a “brain” to be smart. I took Arduino because it is easy to start with.

With Arduino controller, I’m going to operate various electronic devices and components at the garage as well as process data from sensors.

If my garage will become smart, how do I communicate with it?There are many technologies that enable IoT. A communication can be wired, for example via Ethernet. Or it can be wireless. Wireless networks use different protocols with the different ranges of action. The examples are Wi-Fi, RFID (Radio-frequency identification), NFC (Near-field communication), Bluetooth and so on. I think that garages, unlike smart homes, don't usually have high-quality wireless Internet.

I chose Bluetooth. Using this protocol I can control the garage with my smartphone whenever I need it. It is quite practical cause the phone is almost always at hand.

For the garage management, I’ll use a mobile application at my smartphone.

Hardware

I purchased all the necessary electronic components in one place. Surely you can find analogs at your local stores.

I chose the Arduino Mega 2560 microcontroller. This board has lots of digital and analog ports, supports many interfaces and it is sufficiently efficient.  If you are planning to repeat the experiment, you can...

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