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Comment by frik | Hacker News Reader

> "SMS me when I leave my garage door open"

Bad example? How about automatically closing the garage door after I left the garage with the car (e.g. Bluetooth of smartphone). We get too many alerts these days. SMS alert make sense (IMHO) for fire/burglary alarms.

I appreciate such projects and built IoT systems for my needs too.

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That may be more useful to the end-user, but the point of this is to learn how to make a basic IoT project (the title is IoT intro). This includes creating a basic circuit and interfacing with an API on the internet, which is something that a lot of IoT projects need. Closing the door automatically would involve interfacing with the garage-door machinery, which would be more complicated I imagine.

What if you leave your garage door open while your car is parked inside, such as overnight? Depending on your neighbourhood, you might not want to offer the insides of your garage so easily...

E.g. Automatically close the garage door with a beep sound after x minutes of observed inactivity (IR sensor or camera).

I had the same problem about a year ago, then I just bought this and swapped out my existing wall switch. Beeps a warning and autocloses after a minute.

http://www.amazon.com/LiftMaster-888LM-Security-Upgrades-Pre...

Problem with IoT devices like LiftMster is that they rely on the same 'rolling code' technology (see 'Programming' https://www.liftmaster.com/CatalogResourcesV3/en-us/shared/f...) to give the connected device (internet) access to open/close the door. This is long proven to be very insecure: http://www.wired.com/2015/08/hackers-tiny-device-unlocks-car...

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