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Just a suggestion –
I really like the opengarage but feel that with a few changes it could be so much more. Rather than just being limited to garage door monitoring, I think it could have a lot of potential as a smart home monitoring device.
My suggestion would be to keep the same web interface, same nodemMCU or ESP8266 as the brains of the device, keep feeding data to blynk but rather than having a fixed ultrasonic sensor, have the inputs modular. Like a 4 pin connector (that would allow power, ground, and two data lines for input/output). You then have, say, 4 of those connectors available (would need 8 data lines total).
In the web interface, you could then have a drop down list of supported inputs. So you say connector A is an ultrasonic sensor, and you can then plug that sensor in. Connector B could also be an ultrasonic sensor. Connector C could be a switch. Connector D could be a DHT22 temp/humidity sensor. Or you could have 4 temp/humidity sensors. Or 4 ultrasonic sensors. Or whatever combination you wanted.
The user could then put one of these openmonitors anywhere around the property that they wanted to monitor a door/temperature/humidity/distance. This would build on the work that you have already done and really open the device up to whole new areas of use. Rather than one of these in the garage you could have 6 spread around the place. You could then expand on the sensors, to include light sensors, motion sensors, current sensors, accelerometers, soil moisture sensors etc.
I understand that, with the right skills, one could build all of these sensors and feed them to blynk, but I think the idea of being able to plug a sensor into a finished device and select a drop down in a nice web interface and start monitoring and logging sounds really appealing.
Thanks for the suggestion. This is certainly doable, in fact, I’ve been thinking of modifying (I should say simplifying) the firmware to make a WiFi temp/humidity sensor based on DHT22. My only hesitation is that from a product marketing point of view, it’s better to say something is designed for a particular purpose as opposed to say it can do all of X, Y, and Z. It tends to confuse users. That said, I agree that technically it’s all possible to extend OpenGarage as you said to support multiple sensors/actuators.
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