MyQ's horrible take on open access to their devices | Hacker News Reader

MyQ's horrible take on open access to their devices

memos.daviesgeek.com

58 pointsdaviesgeek22 comments

I know someone who worked on MyQ a few years ago. Management was focused on money and then the company got bought by Blackstone. So despite all of the PO's and developers desperately wanting to build a good product that just opens up people's doors, they were forced to put in a ton of dark patterns and implement dumb strategies.

Firstly, I completely agree with the sentiment in this post. I’m one of the many affected by this, and it’s annoying. Secondly, I have a hunch that there is a lawyer on the MyQ side that said that allowing customers to control their doors via api will open MyQ to liability. It’s an absurd argument since, well, it is a door with a remote control, but I can easily picture someone making that argument. I wish there was a way to ensure open compatibility of devices when they are sold, like an “open access” certification.

It would be meaningless. Tech companies promises are worth jack shit. The tech companies messing around in these product categories are often weak and flimsy from a financial perspective. They frequently abandon products, fail, get bought by another company that may not give a shit about their promises, etc

There is no fool proof solution to this. Except maybe make your own I guess. It’s a garage door opener. An esp32 controlling a relay wired to your existing garage door remote probably won’t look as nice but I bet it ends up being more secure

https://opengarage.io

Can’t comment on quality, haven’t got around to installing yet

I've installed two of these several years ago and integrated them with Home Assistant. Working pretty well, no major complaints. It uses a distance sensor to determine whether or not the door is open, so it's not as reliable as state that that the garage door opener has. There was one time the distance sensor acted up and I didn't know if the door was up or down, which was annoying because I was 100 miles away. Other than that, it does what I need it to do.

I run a similar API program for an IoT Manufacturer. Our API is public.

I have a lot of thoughts about this.

Supporting things like this is a mixed bag IMO.

This group (especially Home Assistant) are very technical, hands on, and engaged.

I'm a one man team (soon to be two). Between the "big guys" Alexa, Google, SmartThings, HomeKit, Paying Customers (RMR) it's hard to dedicate time to support what in my world are enthusiast projects outside of simply providing the API developer portal.

On the other side, it's really fun to work with these groups. I just usually run out of time.

The dark side of these integrations is they can be really badly implemented, and possibly misused. I've had to make pull requests to more than one "scraped" API integration because it was sending tons of bad traffic and/or creating unintended results for end-users.

It is mostly a manpower problem to police, and in extreme cases like a garage door being left open/not closing becomes a liability (no matter what your API agreement says).

That being said, our public API has been a net good. We've promoted some real quality partnerships off organic visitors to the website (or my linkedin).

Why require an API in the cloud? Wouldn't that simplify and reduce the exposure to the business?

Why not allow people to securely talk to the IOT device right on the local network? I think that then really puts a bright line on where the liability lays.

TBH, I've always felt that the HA integration with myq was likely a burden for them. It makes way too many requests, IIRC.

But that isn't really their reason. They don't allow IFTT to open the door. Alexa and Google Assistant support is extremely limited.

They've focused on partnerships that directly produce revenue. It is purely a cash grab.

I built an opener with an ESP8266. Cost five bucks, took a couple hours, no cloud, no drama. Thanks to Home Assistant and Homekit integration, anyone in the household can use it effortlessly.

was it ratgdo by chance?

40 bucks, HA, and about half an hour each (mostly fiddling with the ESP/shield pcb wiring inside the light cover of the opener from the awkward overhead-on-a-ladder position) for me to no-cloud smartify two chamberlain MyQ openers. Special sauce is that the device can MITM the "Security2.0+" signal and emulate the discrete functions of the wired wall remote, not just act as a dry contact relay on the motor.

Result is that separate entities are created not just for the door open(ing)-clos(ing) states, but also for the obstruction sensor and a separate switch to turn the opener's light on or off remotely, all exposed (as MQTT topics) in HA.

https://github.com/PaulWieland/ratgdo

This looks like what I want. I’m confused though: what is the radio? WiFi? Zigbee?

Yeah sorry, it's Wi-Fi. It talks to an mqtt broker and that's how home assistant sees it. or anything else that also talks mqtt.

Perfect, thanks!

The only reason that I wanted Home Assistant to integrate with MyQ is to close my garage doors after 15 minutes if they were left open. The fact that their app doesn't support this out of the box tells you everything you need to know about the quality of their software.

Sadly I need MyQ to integrate with my Model 3 though. So I'll probably keep it and get ratgdo too (or something similar since my openers are older than Security 2.0) simply so I can close the door if it's left open.

I’m pretty sure this is possible in their app now but the UX to achieve it is atrocious. I had to follow multiple blog posts to figure it out.

When my 23 years old garage door opener failed to the point were it wasn't repairable, had to pickup new one. All decent ones comes with MyQ. Instead of using MyQ connection, I got extra 883LMW, opened it, soldered two wires to the button and connected it to my existing wifi door opener.

I was excited to get a door opener that I could open remotely and ended up with a MyQ model. I'm pretty sure that I managed to successfully control my door once or twice in 5 years. The app could never find one or both openers, the "door open" alerts never worked, and I eventually uninstalled the app and installed a keypad.

I use the Tuya based openers. They’re cheap and pretty good. I bet you could flash with esphome or other firmwares but I haven’t bothered.

Agree with this, myQ is such a dumpster fire. It needs to have an the ability to be managed over the local network instead of requiring the garage door and app connect to their server.

My very first experience with myQ was figuring out that their IP blocklist provider, brightcloud, blocks anything with the word "proxy" - including the default "it works" page for Nginx Proxy Manager [1]. And they have no way of overriding this to actually provide service if someone turns out to be a legitimate customer.

[1]: https://github.com/NginxProxyManager/nginx-proxy-manager/dis...

The Meross smart garage door opener works well as an alternative.

Mine arrives tomorrow since the MyQ API is borked. Good riddance.

Thanks for posting this. I was wondering why my garage door stopped working with Home Assistant. Infuriating!

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