If you haven’t seen videos of people using their iPhone or Android to open their garage, you are missing out on some excitement. The way it works is there is a bluetooth module which is a transceiver and the mobile device talks to it using SPP. Since iPhone and Android support bluetooth communication using this protocol, you will see videos on youtube with mostly these two devices. Sadly, WP7 doesn’t seem to support SPP as of now or at least to my knowledge it doesn’t seem to have an API for developers to use like the other two do. If any of you know otherwise please let me know.
I got the DaisyWorks bluetooth board and connected it to my garage door wall control switch to simulate the on/off pulse the door switch sends to the opener. I got open source app that DaisyWorks published on github and added some pretty nifty features to it like, Text-to-Speech and Voice Recognition. I have also added two useful features that my car has Coming Home, Leaving Home. Basically, I tell the app at what time I leave home for work and come back home from work and it switches the bluetooth on for an hour given that window and automatically switches it back off after that window to save the phone’s battery.
The good thing about Android phones are that they are actually built on an Open Accessory Development platform. You can read about it here. There are several online resources that can help you build what you need with little programming knowledge and some electrical knowledge as well. Most tutorials, articles do have explanation about the electrical part which is out of scope for this article though (not that I am good at it anyway).
So here’s a video of what I have done with mine. Be sure to leave comments about any questions you may have and thank you for reading this article! Also, look for updates to this application from me.
Cloudy 