Garage Door Opener Relay with a 3D Printed Cover

Garage door automation has taken a lot of heat over the past few years. Largely thanks to the nonsense Chamberlain myQ has introduced by locking down their ecosystem. Thankfully our new home had Genie garage door openers installed. I stayed away from their Aladdin smart integration offering mainly from fear of them following Chamberlain down the lock out external integration rabbit hole.

I decided to leverage a Zooz Zen16 Z-Wave relay. Zooz recommends doing a direct wire integration with their relay so that the relay always controls the device triggering. I decide to try an overlapping install that basically piggybacks the native garage door on wall clicker rather than passing through the clicker signal. My expectation was to keep signal variations completely intact in the easiest manner possible.

Opening up a garage door opener showed a very simple circuit. Tracing down to R1(82 ohms) and R2(120 ohms) was a simple matter of determining the resistance and adding that same resistance into the relay circuit to control the garage door openers. An alternative path would have been to direct wire onto the circuit board but I opted to simply piggy back the wires going to the garage door opener with inline resisters on the relay leads.

I wired the open close signal for each garage door and used the remaining third relay for a light on one of the door openers. The wiring coming off the relay wasn't the best to look at, made even worse with the resistors soldered in line. I decided to 3D print a cover for that initial portion and then use off-the-shelf cord hiders to get it over to the garage door openers.