The poll idea is actually a good way of detecting that the car is in the garage or out since I have the Car node hotwired to 12V. But to have it open the gate without asking for permission, might not be what I would always want. Sometimes I park the car on the curb and it would open the gates when I didn't want to.
So to continue with the remote project, the next step was to get the car Moteino remote connected to the passing lights of my car.
I found a couple of schematics on the net that would allow me to do exactly that. I decided to try to use Eagle Cad to create a small circuit board to be routed on my CNC machine.
My experience with Eagle is almost zero, beside some test experiments. So it was a challenge for me to get some useful results out of it.
This is the schematic of my Moteino car Remote I ended up with:
Initially I had pin 6 of the optocoupler connected to R2 and pin 5 of the opto connected to pin 7 of the Moteino, but couldn't get it to work so after some research, I went on a LOW detection circuit instead, and all worked well.
The car flashing lights 12V are connected to ""LUZES"" on the board, and fed into the optocoupler trough a resistor. D1 is a 23v zener to take care of some wild current that may show up.
The Moteino pins and footprint where taken out from the original Moteino Eagle file after all circuits were deleted.
Eagle autorouter did a terrible job so after a couple of tries I ended up with this:
The blue connection is a wired via that go on the top of the single side board.
I'm sure you will find a lot of those "never do this" errors in my design, but it all worked out fine.
All components are laid down under the Moteino board so the final footprint may be as small as a Moteino itself. The caps need to be bent to the side to allow for space.
The 12/5 v conversion is done by a 78L05 linear regulator. Since there is not much current involved, it is well within the specs of the regulator.
I used a script call PCBGcode on Eagle, that allowed me to produce the Gcode to route out the board tracks, as well as the Drill file with information for the CNC machine to drill the components holes.
And this is the final result. This is not the same board that is on the pic above, because this one still had the HIGH/ON logic that I changed to LOW/ON, as mentioned above.
And the other side is like this (still missing the zener which I didn't had on my parts box)
The cap on the left was rotated on the final board design so that it doesn't have to bend sideways as in this pic.
Final assembly:
All boxed up, and nowhere to go:
And finally, assembled in the car, connected to 12V, ground and the Flash light 12v wire:
So now, when I want to open the outside Gate, I flash the lights 1 time and 2 times to close it. The garage door requires 3 flashes to open, 3 to stop and 3 to close. It may also stop automatically when fully open, of course and in that case it will only require 3 flashes to open and 3 to close.
(continues...)