Mechanical Garage

[Muirium]

So, I've been busy lately. One small project was helping out my brother with a control panel for his garage. He's got an electric door opener but the remotes are fiddly and the motor itself is positioned right above the car so it's hard to reach. Besides, when closing it in windy conditions, the damn thing jolts to a halt midway, rolls all the way open again and needs repeated commands to close. This will never do! Let's hack it.

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He's installed his own programmable controller (not a Teensy…) via a port on the motor assembly, and attached to his Wi-Fi. The generic wall-mount plastic case had space to spare for open and close buttons, but the big dumb switches he bought just won't fit inside with the bulk of his over-engineered electronics.

Fortunately, I had an easy answer:

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Yes, this opener is now powered by MX. These switches are much smaller, easy to install, pleasantly clicky, aren't fussy about concrete dust, and, of course, come with an unparalleled choice of caps:

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These look the best but I don't fancy yellowing and shining them unnecessarily:

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So he's actually wound up with those red keys, which were spares with my NovaTouch. I don't mind if they go a little grubby with use, and up on the wall they look pretty good.

Now his garage is remote controllable via Siri shortcuts and anything else he cooks up to connect to it, reliably closes itself when it's windy, and has a reassuringly clicky wall panel.

[Johnbo]

Ha, the garage door opener button in my last place was old and barely worked. I always wanted to replace it with an MX switch but never got around to it. Glad to see someone else realized my vision!

[Muirium]

Great minds, eh?

As soon as he showed me the lack of space inside the box, I knew this was the perfect job for MX. I let him choose between linear and clicky switches. MX Green it was. Reassuringly clicky. Their audible feedback comes a half second or so before the motor kicks in, removing much of the sense of delay.

Here's the motor overhead which this thing controls:

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His description:

That’s the panel inside the door opener. The spare RJ12 socket there is an RS485 serial bus. I wired that up to an RS485 to UART adapter to the ESP32-C3.

Okay, so he put the switches in random orientation, but otherwise a pretty good first custom mechanical keyboard build.