When my wife leaves for work it’s frequently dark, cold, and raining. Our standalone garage has a human door and locking doorknob. Since she needs to open the garage door for the car anyway I thought, “Why not just open the garage door when she approaches?” I figured I could detect her cell phone.

I’m using a Raspberry Pi Pico running a cron job to ping the Bluetooth address of her phone every morning. The Pi has a relay and when the script detects her phone it closes the relay which acts as a button press on the opener button inside the garage.

I also added Safari bookmarks to both of our cell phones so that they function as garage door openers. They come in handy when we’ve forgotten to close the garage at the end of the day.

It’s not gonna win any design awards, but its been running like this for well over a year.