Our new Smart Garage Door Opener (GDO) White is shipping now!
Over the Christmas holiday last year we announced two new Garage Door Opener products, the first of which just started shipping this week! Everyone who pre-ordered the new GDO White should have received a shipping notification in the past couple of days.
The new GDO White (model: GDOv2-S) is an upgrade to the original smart garage door retrofit product that we released last May. It’s a small, elegant looking, Wi-Fi connected device that hooks up to your garage door opener with just two wires and mounts on the ceiling of the garage. Using a built-in optical laser sensor the device can “see” if the garage is open or closed, and can control the garage door by triggering the push-button switch.
The GDO White is made for garage door openers with a simple push-button (dry contact) switch. This includes most garage door openers on the market except for Chamberlain/LiftMaster brands with a round yellow learn button. If you have a Chamberlain brand opener, check out our new GDO blaQ which is specifically designed for tighter integration with Chamberlain’s Security+ technology.
Shipping with ESPHome pre-installed!
The new GDO White is our first product that is shipping with ESPHome firmware!
This represents a very exciting evolution of Konnected’s technology, and deserves some explanation. ESPHome is a powerful and flexible open-source firmware development framework backed by the genius people at Nabu Casa (the parent company of Home Assistant). I started looking at ESPHome a little more than a year ago and we’ve offered it as an alternate firmware for Konnected devices for quite some time. I’m extremely impressed with the power, speed, and capability of ESPHome and made the decision last year that Konnected will slowly transition all of our products to ESPHome firmware in 2024. The GDO White is an important milestone in that transition!
Local and FAST with Home Assistant and Hubitat
The new GDO White works locally out-of-the box with Home Assistant and Hubitat! (Hubitat users: install the driver bundle or via HPM). Home Assistant users just need to plug it in, connect to WiFi, and Home Assistant will find it automatically on the network.
Cloud Optional: Integration with SmartThings & Alexa via Konnected’s Cloud Connector
Cloud optional means that the new GDO White is local by default. My team and I have put in a tremendous amount of effort to build an optional cloud-connector for ESPHome. It’s almost ready for prime time!
(I admit, we’re a little bit behind here)
In the coming days, we’re releasing a big update to the Konnected mobile app and cloud platform to support ESPHome devices. The GDO White is the first product that will be supported, soon followed by the Alarm Panel Pro and upcoming GDO blaQ. Here’s how it’ll work:
- Plug in your new Konnected GDO White with ESPHome
- Connect it to Wi-Fi
- Discover & register it in the Konnected app
- Apply a firmware update
- You’re connected to Konnected Cloud!
I know many of you who are receiving your brand new GDO White this week are anxious to get up and running in SmartThings and Alexa. We’re so close! Please use this thread to ask questions and get help as you are one of the first to use this new Konnected Cloud integration path!