Athom Smart Garage Door Opener for ESPHome

On Aliexpress we found a shop called Athom that sells hardware specifically for ESPhome, Tasmota, Homekit and WLED. We usually flash hardware ourselves, but since Tuya is now selling hardware with different kinds of MCU’s, it is no longer possible to flash most of these devices with esphome or tasmota. Even if you still could, it’s not always clear you should. Some enclosures are a real pain to open, so a company that sells these devices ‘ready to use’ is more then welcome 🙂

I must be honest… I don’t have a garage, but a carport, still Athom’s Garage Door Opener fascinated me. As I don’t have a use for it, I’ll save it for a giveaway later on. For now we’ll test this in a simulated setup and we we’ll see how it works.

A Garage Door Opener usually works with a simple pushbutton and a RF remote. Pressing the button will either open or close the door, depending on its current state. So automating the Garage Door in Home Asssistant using esphome should be pretty straight forward. Using a esp8266 and a simple relay should do the trick. If you want to make it more fancy, you could add a sensor or switch (or maybe even two) so Home Assistant knows if the Garage Door is open or closed.

This is exactly what Athom did. An enclosure with a esp8285, a relay and a (1) Reed switch. A Reed switch is an electrical switch operated by an applied magnetic field. If you move a small magnet in front of the switch the contact is closed. Mount this switch either at the top or the bottom of your Garage door frame and the magnet on the door itself and you have a pretty reliable way of knowing if your Garage Door is open or closed.

So if it’s that simple, why even buy this rather then build it yourself? For under $17 you get a complete set with esphome preinstalled. Fort that money you will have a very hard time sourcing all the components yourself and it will cost you a few hours to set it up.

Literally all required parts for a successful install in your Garage are included in the set.

The main question is: Is the Athom Smart Garage Door Opener any good? Off-course we took the device apart. The PCB is nice and tidy. The MCU is a Tuya TYE3S, more or less a standard ESP8266 with 2MB of flash. Furthermore there is a relay, LED, pushbutton, USB (only for power, no DATA) and two 2-pin JST connectors. Nice and simple. Based on what we found in the box, we have to say this is a nice and reliable looking set for just a few $.

When we connect a USB power supply to the Athom Smart Garage Door Opener, the device presents a WiFi access-point with the name of the device and a MAC Address suffix.

Connect to the Wifi network and Home Assistant will automatically discover the device. You can then simply add it by just clicking the notification and following the instructions.

It’s really that simple. It’s not even necessary to install ESPhome itself. ESPhome is only required if you would like to create your own config or if you would like to update to a newer version.

In that case it’s best to just create a new device in ESPhome, enter the config as provided by Athom  and then choose ‘manual install’. ESPhome will create a new binary file which you can then in turn upload to the Garage Door Opener web-interface (OTA update).

After you have verified the device and switch are working correctly, installing it in your garage should be pretty straight forward. Install the switch somewhere on your garage door frame where the magnet and the switch come in close proximity of each other when the door is fully closed.

If you want to install this Athom Smart Garage Door Opener, please check if you have a simple switch for opening and closing the door, or check if your motor has a switch input. If so, nothing should be standing in your way of installing this great gadget and make another part of your house smart! 🙂

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