Steve Does Stuff Builds a Flask-Powered Remote Garage Door Web App on a Raspberry Pi Zero W
With a Raspberry Pi, relay, reed switches, and Flask, Steve has a way to control his garage door from his phone quickly and easily.
Steve, of the eponymous Steve Does Stuff YouTube channel, has published a guide to browser-based remote control of a garage door — including usage logging and status reporting — using a Raspberry Pi Zero W single-board computer and the Flask Python web framework.
Steve's garage door control system is built around a Raspberry Pi Zero W, the second-cheapest model in the Raspberry Pi family of single-board computers - more expensive than the entry-level Raspberry Pi Zero, but with on-board Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity lacked by its cheaper stable-mate. This is wired to a magnetic reed switch to sense whether the door is opened or closed, and a four-channel relay to trigger the door motor on demand.
The actual remote control comes courtesy of the Flask web framework, designed to provide an easy way to create web services using Python. Steve has already done the hard work: His pre-built software can be quickly cloned via git and installed on the Raspberry Pi, needing only a default password and port to be tweaked before execution.
While there are drawbacks to Steve's approach — Flask is set up without encryption, meaning that the password is transmitted in plain text, and the web app doesn't know the status of the garage door until a request is sent — it's a quick introduction to using Flask and the Raspberry Pi for remote control and home automation systems.
The full video is available on Steve's YouTube channel, while the source code and a written guide can be found on his GitHub repository under an unspecified licence.