Monitor if Your Garage Door is Open with Netduino Plus

This blog post is going to document how to build an infrared sensor to monitor your garage door. It is part of a series to build an Android garage door app.

Supplies

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• Netduino plus (if you don't already have one). There are many places you can buy one and they seem to charge about the same $59.95.
• Amazon
• Sparkfun
• Maker Shed
  
  
• Optical Detector / Phototransistor $1.13. (I bought mine from Sparkfun)
  
  
• 200 ohm resistor (under a buck from any almost anywhere)
• 5.6K ohm resistor (under a buck from any almost anywhere)
• (Optional) (2) Screw Terminals 3.5mm Pitch $1.25 ea.
• Sparkful
• (Optional) PC Board $2.19 for two.
• Radio Shack

1. Build it

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Follow this schematic to build your garage door sensor.

 This is what mine looks like (I used the PC board and terminals to make mine a little more tidy).

And here is the sensor installed in the garage. I placed it on the side facing the side plate. When the door is open the sensor detects an object close.

2. Code it

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If you have not installed all the necessary software see my previous blog post on how to setup your Netduino Plus development environment here (How to Setup Netduino Plus Development Environment).


Create a new project
Launch Visual Studio 2010 then create a new project (File > New Project > Netduino Plus Application). Let's name it NetduinoInfraredSensor.

Open Program.cs

• Line 2 we define an AnalogInput and set it for PIN 0
  
  
  
• Line 4 we set the range for reading the analog signal from 0 to 1024
• Lines 6-10 are the main infinite loop. 
• Line 8 we read the voltage through analog input 0 (which will return a value of 0 to 1024 which proportionally to the voltage coming from the infrared sensor we built and hooked up to analog input 0).
• Line 9 we sleep the program for 1 second (so the program debug output is not flooding through the debug window). Be careful with loops that don't contain any Thread sleep commands. It is possible to for Visual Studio to have difficulty connecting and deploying if the loop is too tight. To be safe always throw in a sleep even if its just for a fraction of second.

//Set the analog pin to monitor Pin 0
AnalogInput garageSensor = new AnalogInput(Pins.GPIO_PIN_A0);
//Set sensor range
garageSensor.SetRange(0, 1024);
//Program loop
while (true)
{
    Debug.Print(garageSensor.Read().ToString());
    Thread.Sleep(1000);
}

3. Run it

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First we need to change the project properties to deploy the program to the Netdiuno Plus and not an emulator (default). Right click on the project > properties > .Net Framework. Change the Transport to USB and make sure Netdiuno Plus is the device. (Your Netduino must attached to the computer via USB cable before making this change).

Now we can run the program in debug mode by pressing F5 or Debug > Start Debugging. Now hold an object about 3 inches from the infrared sensor and slowly move it towards the sensor. You will begin to see the reading drop from 1024.

Here is the complete code for the sensor.



To learn how to write the Android app that will control and monitor the garage door read the step by step blog post here. http://androidcodemonkey.blogspot.com/2011/10/android-garage-door-app.html