Hi, it doesn’t explicitly say on the site/product page, but a moderate big deal to me is if the new BlaQ will let me use existing doorbell / dry contact switches I have wired around the garage to open / close a new garage door. (Because of course we needed encryption on our inside wiring) How about the old school multi-buttons that let you turn the light on-off and stuff?
Yes, there is one dry-contact input on the GDO blaQ. You could use it to detect the press of an doorbell / dry-contact button and then relay that to the garage door as an encrypted toggle command.
You could also use that input for a wired contact sensor, motion sensor, etc.
Hi @nate - could you please clarify one thing. Does the BlaQ require additional programming / scripts to be used as a passthrough for a dry-contact opener? Or does it work out of the box that way? I think I’ve wired it up correctly using ports (1) and (2), but I’m having trouble getting the dry contact to pass through to my recent LiftMaster door.
Thank you!
The dry contact pass-thru does not work out of the box. In fact, the inputs (1) and (2) are disabled out of the box.
Our plan has always been to enable a multitude of uses for these additional inputs, which can be enabled via a firmware update in the Konnected app or by customizing the firmware YAML (for advanced users). Unfortunately this hasn’t happened yet because we were waiting on one ESPHome feature to be added which would make it easier for us to package and include these add-hoc features into our config packages. This was just merged and will be part of ESPHome 2025.3.0 later this month, so we’re getting close.
In the meantime, if you’re managing your GDO blaQ config yourself using ESPHome Builder, you can add the capability. This snippit of config would enable input (1) to toggle the garage door when pushed:
binary_sensor:
- platform: gpio
pin:
number: $input1
mode: INPUT_PULLUP
inverted: true
name: Garage Door Relay
on_click:
min_length: 50ms
max_length: 3s
then:
- cover.toggle: gdo_door