It’s finally happening. After months of late-night PCB tweaks, fried components, firmware experiments, and more than one “why is it doing that?” moment, my Smart Garage Controller is nearly ready for the world.

This isn’t just another Wi-Fi relay in a plastic box. Those exists already – and most of them are unreliable, cloud-dependent, or built around firmware you’ll never control. I wanted something different. Something built for real homes, real motors, and real automation enthuisiasts.

Here’s your first peek behind the curtain.

Built for Home Assistant from day one

• Everything runs locally.
• No cloud, no accounts, no monthly fees.
• Just instant discovery, fast responses, and complete control.

The controller is powered by ESPHome, which means your Home Assistant instance instantly discovers it, configures it, and exposes all the sensors and controls you need. If you love tinkering, you can adjust every parameter. If you want it to “just work”, it does that too….

Smarter sensing with mmWave

Garages are strange rooms: hot, dusty, echo-prone, and full of objects that confuse simpler sensors. PIR gets confused in hot garages, ultrasonic has blind spots, and cameras eat bandwidth.

mmWave^*1 solves this.

The controller integrated mmWave presence detection to enable brilliant automations – like auto-lighting or warnings if someone is inside after dark.

Ultrasonic detection to know when a vehicle is home

Presence isn’t just about people. Sometimes the key questions is:

Is the car actually in the garage?

The controller supports an optional ultrasonic distance sensor^*2 that can detect whether a vehicle (or two) is parked inside. Home Assistant uses that to:

• turn off lights if the garage is empty
• send alerts when the car leaves or returns
• help you build a beautiful “Garage Occupancy” tile on your dashboard

It’s one of those small features that quietly transforms how you interact with your home.

Built-in temperature and humidity sensor

Garages get ridiculous in summer. They trap heat like ovens and collect moisture like forgotten basements.

So the controller includes temperature and humidity sensing right on the board. You can use readings to:

• Monitor how harsh the environment really is
• Trigger ventilation fans automatically
• Detect extreme heat events
• Keep an eye on conditions that might affect stored tools, pains, or electronics (or even inverters and batteries)

It’s simple data, but extremely useful when your garage becomes part of a larger, smarter ecosystem.

Cleaner installation, modular design

• No Soldering
• No figuring out pinouts
• No hoping the relay doesn’t stick

The design is modular: plug in what you need, keep the rest tidy and mount the unit on or next to the garage motor on the rail.

Supported Motors

Although the unit should support most / all motors, there may be some additional components / considerations with some motors. It has been tested with:

• Centurion Smart SD04 – Built for this unit and works perfectly
• Digidoor II – Works, but requires external power supply
• Others – Feel free to reach out if you have other motors. I am keen to get this tested on as many motors as possible.

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Coming in 2026 – and you can join the early access list

The production version is nearly ready. Early units will be limited, and I’ll be giving subscribers priority access along with special launch pricing.

Keep an eye on homeautomations.xyz, where I’ll open the early interest list soon.

This is the controller I always wanted for my own garage. Next year, I get to share it.

^{*1 Optional Extra item – Various models supported}

^{*2 Optional Extra}