Enlarge / A ratgdo, version 2.53i. (credit: Ratcloud LLC)

I live in suburbia, which means I’ve got a garage (or a carhole, if you’re not so fancy). It’s a detached garage, so part of my nightly routine when I check to make sure the house is all locked up is to peek out the back window. I like to know the garage door is closed and our cars are tucked in safely.

But actually looking out a window with my stupid analog eyeballs is lame, so I figured I could make things easier by adding some smarts to my garage. The first thing I did was use this fellow’s instructions (the original site is sadly offline, but the Wayback Machine is forever) to cobble together a Raspberry Pi-based solution that would fire off an email every time the garage door opened or closed. I couldn’t remotely open or close the door from inside the house myself (well, I mean, I could with the actual garage door opener remote control), but I could just glance at my inbox to see if the garage door was open or shut in the evenings.

This worked great for a couple of years, until Texas summers murdered the poor Pi. (This was possibly my fault, too, because of the PoE hat that I’d slapped onto the Pi, which resulted in extra heat.) So, I was back to peeking out my window to check on the garage in the evenings. Like a sucker.