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Image: reddit.com · I built a self-hosted garage door (well, you can track what you want) monitor that uses my existing camera instead of a door sensor - Home Assistant ready

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A garage door monitor that reads the door state from a camera

A self-hosted app built with Claude compares camera frames to open and closed reference photos and publishes the garage door state to Home Assistant over MQTT.

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Credits

  • Reddit poster 0xZIM Source ↗

Earliest dated source: 5 Jun 2026

The full story

Rather than fit a sensor to his garage door, the poster built a self-hosted web app with Claude that works out the door's state from an existing RTSP camera. You take reference photos of the door open and closed and crop to the door panel; each cycle it normalises contrast and compares the frame against both.

If neither matches confidently twice in a row it deliberately reports open. The state goes to Home Assistant over MQTT discovery as a read-only binary sensor, in a single Docker container.

How it was done

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Sources

From a short post by the maker, so the details are as they tell them.

  • Reddit: I built a self-hosted garage door (well, you can track what you want) monitor that uses my existing Forum threadreddit.com
    Reddit poster: 0xZIMPosted 5 Jun 2026

    The maker's post on r/homeassistant.

    If it disappears: archived copy of Reddit: I built a self-hosted garage door (well, you can track what you want) monitor that uses my existing (opens in a new tab)

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Prompt & Solder

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