For the hardware I made it my mission to use as much common off the shelf components as I could that had a long supply life.
I recall an Open Source touch rotary switch that had a small LCD screen in the centre of it. I thought it looked like something that Tony Stark would have built. However there was one part (a major part at that) that was bought of Alibaba or something, I think it was the motor. This part was “off the back of a truck” so you couldn’t buy a replacement and other people couldn’t make one as well.
Hardware parts needed to have the following attributes:
- Economical
- Be from a major supplier
- Available around the globe (not just in Australia)
I started with the compute hardware. I new that I didn’t want just a microcontroller (like an Arduino) I wanted a small PC (the reasons listed below under Software). A Raspberry Pi 4 was chosen as I have had experience with Raspberry Pi’s before and knew that they were capable machines and importantly had GPIO (General Purpose Input/Output). Other boards were researched but as you can buy Raspberry Pi’s anywhere and they are “relatively” cheap I decided to used these as the platform.
The last advantage of the Raspberry Pi is that it has wireless networking built in. So this meant that I only needed to get power to it which I could use the power point that the garage door plugged into.
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