Ed IresonMay 18, 2026

Automating Garage Door Alerts with Home Assistant 🏠

4views

Automating Garage Door Alerts with Home Assistant 🏠

Ed Ireson

Learn how to set up a garage door notification system using ESPHome and Home Assistant. This walkthrough covers the automation logic for alerts and managing your configuration via a local YAML file.

Automating Garage Door Alerts with Home Assistant 🏠

Ed Ireson

Learn how to set up a garage door notification system using ESPHome and Home Assistant. This walkthrough covers the automation logic for alerts and managing your configuration via a local YAML file.

Chapters

00:00

Introduction

Discussing the garage door incident and the project overview.

00:13

ESPHome Setup

00:45

Home Assistant Integration

01:10

Garage Door Automations

01:53

Local Automation Management

Transcript

00:00

So I heard you had a garage door incident.

00:03

anyway, I happen to be working on something this weekend and I unlocked kind of a cool concept.

00:09

So I wanted to talk through how I've got my RAT go set up.

00:13

so I've got the ESP firmware here.

00:15

I had the HomeKit one, but there was something.

00:18

it's, it's Homekit requires you like use face ID to open a garage and if I route it instead through Home Assistant, I don't have to do face ID because it's like a different pattern for Siri.

00:29

But anyway, that's the reason I ended up doing that.

00:31

I don't think it really matters at the end of the day but.

00:32

Well it does matter if you use Home assistant.

00:34

So anyway, I've got this set up.

00:36

I've got inside of my home Assistant, the ESP somewhere here in Ease ESP Home Integration.

00:42

And then that has the device and that device you know, has all the runs for things here.

00:50

and then it's got a bunch of automations.

00:52

But the one that matters is garage left open.

00:55

And so when the garage door opens, wait two minutes and then start doing this loop that checks every 30 seconds to see if it's still open and send push notification.

01:05

I have this like weird fear that like the garage door closes on a small child, so I only have it like yelling at me.

01:12

I basically send a push notification and I think what I'm probably gonna add it to like announce something in the speakers, over the Sonos.

01:19

But anyway, so super simple thing to set up and like nice and easy.

01:26

This is the first time I think I've seen this page before.

01:28

so I use this Home Assistant API wrapper and so this is installed on my machine and just like makes it easy to kind of integrate with the two APIs they have.

01:40

And so then I have my own GitHub repo full of my home assistant automations and stuff.

01:47

And so Automation DML is like all my different automations.

01:50

Right?

01:51

Anyway, so locally I've got this automations YAML file that's on my local Mac mini, in this get backed repo.

01:59

And so now I just, in Codex, can have it, you know, explain my garage door automation.

02:04

And it, it kind of reads out what it does, I was kind of planning on this video.

02:09

I had it, had it do this and explain just how it works.

02:12

I've got unifi protect cameras that are tied into Home Assistant as well.

02:17

And so there's a, like inside the garage camera and an outside the garage camera.

02:21

And it's using person detection, for checking to see if the garage is left open.

02:26

So that my goal is that the notification actually only sends if it doesn't see somebody inside the garage.

02:31

Like if we're out, doing something in the yard or playing in the driveway or something.

02:35

It's not yelling at me that the garage left open because it sees somebody's there.

02:38

And it will only start yelling if it doesn't see somebody there.

02:42

so that's the unifi protect integration.

02:44

I also, just because I didn't have unify connected to, Home Assistant until recently, I also have like a Z wave motion detector that's also in there.

02:51

And so it's like, I think it's hitting all, it's checking all the different sensors and trying to make sure that we're not doing it.

02:57

My guess is if I built up enough confidence that I could actually trust that it was reliably finding people in there, I might let it close the door automatically.

03:06

But frankly, I probably just let it keep sending me push notifications.

03:09

So it resolves.

03:11

But the unlock for me is that there's now the concept of I can open Codex on my phone and remotely access this session on my Mac.

03:19

And so I just like voiced into Codex as I was walking down the stairs, like, update it so that it sends a final notification so that the doors were closed.

03:28

Because I was, know, get these like, set of notifications.

03:29

It was like your doors left open, your doors left open, doors left open.

03:32

And then they would stop.

03:34

And needed, I just wanted some kind of final, okay, it's closed, don't worry about it anymore.

03:38

You can delete that bulk set of notifications.

03:41

So I just opened ChatGPT, read it out, you know, did the voice transcription thing and it sent it over to codecs, ran it on my machine, and five minutes later it was like live.

03:51

It fully shipped it, which is crazy.

03:54

resolves.

03:54

Anyway, I don't know how useful this was, but, like, there was some magic thing where I like.

03:57

Because you can now tie codecs into your phone that accesses my Mac, it has the ability to, like, mess with the YAML file, ship the YAML file to home Assistant and call it a day.

04:06

And, like, that was magic.

04:08

when that happened,

Automating Garage Door Alerts with Home Assistant 🏠 — Tella