When my wife leaves for work in the morning it’s frequently dark, cold, and raining. Since she needs to open the garage door for the car anyway I thought it would be possible to automate that.

I’m using a Raspberry Pi Pico running a cron job to ping the Bluetooth address of her phone every morning. When the script detects her phone it closes a relay, effectively pressing the garage door button on the wall.

I also added Safari bookmarks to our cell phones so that they function as garage door openers. It’s been running for over two years now.