Garage Door Controller Tutorial - Step 8 - Mount and connect

We have just a few more things to take care of:

1. We need to mount your device
2. Connect it to your actual garage door opener
3. Connect to the reed (magnet) switch (optional)
4. Connect your Ethernet
5. Connect power

Sounds like a lot, but you've already done all the hard work of running wires and cables, so now it's just a matter of hooking everything up. Let's get started!

1. Mount device
I actually have a small area near my garage door opener that allowed me to mount mine on a vertical surface instead of on the ceiling (which should be no problem if you need to do this). Here it is mounted on the small surface:

See the screws at the 4 corners? I just pre-drilled some holes in the wood, then used standard drywall screws to attach it to the drywall, just above my garage door opener.

2. Connect your device to your actual garage door opener

Now we have to connect a couple wires to your actual garage door opener. You know that push button in your garage that you use to open/close your garage door?:

My button looks like the above, but yours will probably look different. The way that your garage door controller works is by simulating a button-push from this button. So what you need to do is hook up 2 wires that are going to connect your garage door opener to your garage door controller device. How do you know which terminals (you probably have 3 of them) on your garage door opener you connect to? An easy way is to just follow the wires from your existing switch to your opener. The back of my opener looks like the following:

Back of my garage door opener

You can see that the existing wire for the existing switch connects to the 2 terminals on the left. So I connected a red wire to the middle terminal, and a black wire to the left-hand terminal. The colors don't actually matter, so don't worry about using different colors or marking them or anything.

Connect the other end of  the wires to the top-left hand terminal block on your garage door controller:

Again, don't worry about which wire is which - it doesn't matter.

3. Connect to the reed (magnet) switch (optional)

If you ran 2 wires for your opened/closed sensor in Step 6, let's connect those now. We're going to connect those 2 wires to the terminal block just below the one we just used:

4. Connect your Ethernet
Let's connect our Ethernet cable to the jack that is on the far bottom right hand of the device:

5. Connect power
Your garage door opener is probably physically near an electrical outlet, so this step should be easy too. Plug in the AC Adapter into the outlet, and into your device, and your done with the hardware!

See the power cable plugged into the power jack at the bottom left of your device? Well plug it in!

I highly recommend that you use a surge protector instead of plugging directly into the outlet.

The power LED should come on and you'll start to see some lights flashing on the Ethernet Shield. Pat yourself on the back and rejoice - you are done! (With the hardware aspect anyway)

Well, hardware is no good without software, right? Right. That brings us to the last step - Step 9 - Smartphone app. (Don't worry, this is easy)

Return to previous - Step 7 - your network.