The GDO blaQ has been out on the market for about two months now and one of the issues we’re tracking and working on is related to Security+1.0 openers (those with a purple, red, or square yellow learn button). A few people have reported issues where the garage door opens unexpectedly and with no command being sent. In these cases there’s nothing in the logs that indicates that an open command was sent – it just opens by itself 
Of course we are taking this issue very seriously as it’s both a security and safety concern, and our top priority is creating a safe and secure product. I am opening up this thread to be fully transparent about the issue so that we can all work together to solve it, and I invite you all to participate here in this discussion.
First, Some Background
Security+ first came on the market in the late 1990s, so needless to say it’s a pretty antiquated technology. Prior to Security+ the way that garage openers worked was by a simple push-button or “dry contact” trigger. Security+ added a rudimentary serial protocol over the 12V red and white wires that connect your garage opener to the wall button – so now instead of just a simple push-button trigger, the garage opener button can send commands over the wire for different functions, and receive status updates from the opener for different states (such as if the garage is open or closed, or if the light is on or off). The GDO blaQ works by using a reverse-engineered software library that decodes and emulates Security+ so we can tap into the status of the garage door and send commands.
Security+1.0 openers work with the Security+1.0 serial protocol, but they also work with an old-school dry-contact (push-button) trigger. This detail will be important in a minute.
One Digital Device per Opener
If you have a Security+1.0 garage opener, you may have a dumb analog button OR a “smart” digital wall button. When you hook up the GDO blaQ for the first time, it tries to detect if you have a Security+1.0 opener with a digital button by listening for the status queries over the wire. If it doesn’t find one, the blaQ will emulate a digital wall button, continuously communicating with the garage opener to ask for its status and reporting that to your smart home app.
Only one digital device can be connected to a single opener, so if you have a smart/digital wall button, then we need to make sure that the GDO blaQ does not try to emulate one. A smart/digital wall button looks like this (has a motion sensor on the front and additional buttons for learn and timer close, and may have a myQ logo):
If you have a wall button like this, be sure to enable the Security+1.0 with smart panel protocol option on the device’s web page after setting it up for the first time:
What’s Causing the Random Opening?
One cause of the spontaneous door trigger may be communication collision between the GDO blaQ and another digital wall button on the same circuit. The setting described above should address that.
If you’re still having problems, another cause could be an unexpected crash or reboot. The Security+1.0 openers also can be triggered by an old-school push-button closure, and this may be part of the problem. Normally, the GDO blaQ should never make a dry contact closure – it’s not designed to do that. However, we’ve found that in case of a crash or unhandled reboot, the chip inside the device could reset the inputs just long enough that it triggers the garage opener. Crashes like this should never happen, but we’ve been working with a few customers that seem to have experienced them and we’re trying to figure out how to fix them.
Today I released firmware update 1.2.5 which includes some additional logging and debug sensors. If you experience a random trigger, check the new Reboot Reason sensor on the device’s web page after it comes up:
Also, please observe the Uptime sensor which represents the time elapsed since the blaQ has booted. If this number resets corresponding to when you experience a spontaneous door movement, then it was probably caused by an unhandled reboot:
I’ve also added an Heap Free sensor, which reports every 30 seconds the amount of free memory on the chip. In case there’s a memory leak or similar, this data should help us determine that. If you’re using Home Assistant, this value will be automatically charted so it’s easy to see if it’s declining over time and leading to a crash:
Your Feedback Needed!
We’ve only had a small handful of customers faced with this issue, and in order to get to the bottom of it and fix it for good, I need your help! So far it has been very difficult to reproduce the issue in our test environment, but with the strength of this community and a bit of communication, I’m sure we can narrow down the cause.
With this added debugging metrics in v1.2.5, I think we should have the tools available to figure it out. Please reply to this thread with your observations and experience. Thanks!
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