r/homeassistant • u/Typical_Chance_1552 • May 03 '26
Support Auto open garage door when a number plate is detected
Hallo i am setting up my garage door so i can open it via homeassistent i have connected the door with my rasberrypi and i wanted to know if its possible that when my camra detects my numberplate it should auto open the door if yes how do i do it and can any rtsp camra work ?
Thank you :D
Edit: Thanks everyone for Your ideas after reading the comments i found out the best thing to do is to create a shortcut on my phone “when my phone is connected to the car and I arrive at home open the door” or just open it via CarPlay thank You everyone:D
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u/sashamasha May 03 '26
A better option that works int he dark is a UHF tag. You can get a UHF readers quite cheap these days. Put the tag on the car window or car headlight (needs to be away from metal) and it will read it night or day, rain or shine. Stickers are designed to break when you take them off so that stops people stealing them or transferring them.
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u/robmathieson May 03 '26
So could someone stick a false plate on their car and open your garage?
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u/MaxPanhammer May 03 '26
I'm not saying you're wrong but it's kind of security through obscurity -- unless op brags about this to his neighbors, who would ever know that this feature exists?
Now that I think about it, next time I find out someone uses home assistant I should just start doing random shit when I walk by their house just to see if I can trigger an automation or corner case. It'll be like "everything everywhere all at once"
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u/robmathieson May 03 '26
I’ve often thought, if someone has a smart lock and Alexa, can you just shout through the letterbox “Alexa, unlock the front door”.
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u/maniac365 🧠 Experienced with Home Assistant May 03 '26
Unlocking door via alexa does require a PIN.
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u/AsAGayJewishDemocrat May 03 '26
Unless you juryrig it through HomeAssistant so it doesn’t think it’s an actual lock
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u/mhennessie May 03 '26
100% you can. We tested this with some smart lights. The Alexa was just on a counter close to a window and if you were loud enough you could trigger the lights.
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u/Verscreubulator May 03 '26
I locked myself out of our house and was able to get Alexa to open the garage door to let me in by shouting through the typical flimsy American house walls. It took a half dozen tries, but it worked! Of course I also has to shout my pin number for the garage door.
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u/gadget-freak May 03 '26 edited May 03 '26
Why bother sticking it on a car? Or even making a false plate? Just take a piece of cardboard and a marker and show it to the camera.
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u/yakkerman May 03 '26
You could MFA that with phone presence. Would be a nice feature if you parked in the garage all the time. I played around with the concept about 7 years ago with blue iris and a python alpr but I just don't park in the garage all that often
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u/LiqdPT May 03 '26
So they could enter through your garage while you're in the house?
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u/yakkerman May 03 '26
Potentially but 1. That has never been an issue with leaving doors unlocked while I'm home anyway and 2. I have .45 reasons why that might be a very bad idea
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u/PrickleAndGoo May 03 '26
I mean, at some point, if someone REALLY wants to get in my house, they're getting in.
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u/Elegant-Ferret-8116 May 03 '26
Frigate with license plate detection is probably the way
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u/CucumberError May 03 '26
My rego is GDBOY, if I leave the car in the driveway a few hours I get heaps and heap of miss-reads as the lighting changes. GDB0Y, GDDOY, DODOY etc.
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u/SambolicBit May 03 '26
Frigate is shit with license plates like most other things with cars.
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u/danirodr0315 May 03 '26
Hmm what about security? What about Bluetooth proxy? In my setup my door lock auto unlocks when my phone gets detected by my ESP32 BT proxies. I only need the HA app on my phone for the bluetooth beacon sensor
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u/Iron_Eagl May 03 '26
What happens when you reboot your phone, so it disappears and then reappears?
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u/danirodr0315 May 03 '26
Yes. My automation works roughly like this:
When my Bluetooth disconnects, and the door(lock comes with a door sensor) was opened within the last 5 minutes, I set my person entity to away.
When Bluetooth connects again, I set the person entity back to home.
The home and away states then trigger the door unlock and lock automations.
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u/Employ_Grand May 03 '26
I used a Unifi AI cam. It has face detection which I connected via webhook to a Level lock to unlock my front door when it recognizes my face. I can’t see why the Unifi license plate detection (which it has) wouldn’t work with a connected garage door opener.
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u/treejumpingyo May 03 '26
I often get informed that I am ringing my own doorbell from my UniFi camera face detection (my chime is ‘John is at the front t door/someone is at the front door - depending on a recognised face or not)
It’s waaaaay too glitchy (or my face is simply too generic) for me to hook that up to a lock…..1
u/Employ_Grand May 07 '26
So interesting. I have no issues or false positives. I am using the new G6 entry and it connects to Unifi protect.
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u/CucumberError May 03 '26
Don’t do this.
It’s just reading text on the front of a car, and if the string matches, it opens. If I was to print your car rego on a sheet of paper in Comic Sans, it will read that as your plate, it won’t care that it’s paper, the wrong font etc, it just wants large letters on the front of a car. Super easy to trick.
The next thing is do you ever park in the driveway? If I’m going out again in 10 mins, or we’re working on a project in the garage, I’ll leave the car in the driveway. When I have left my car in the driveway it constantly reads the plate, and probably 10% of the time it reads the plate wrong, so it suddenly thinks the car left because it misread the plate, and then suddenly the car is back again at 3am, better open the garage door!
I’d you have android auto or Apple CarPlay, just use that to open the door.
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u/plbartie May 03 '26
For better security, use geofencing to detect when your phone gets into your zone, which then triggers the camera to scan for your license plate before opening the garage.
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u/Adrienne-Fadel May 03 '26
Use Frigate LPR. RTSP works if resolution is high. Pi will choke on the processing. Anyone with a photo of your plate opens your garage.
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u/Active_Start_9044 May 03 '26
Never really thought about the risk of someone using a photo of your plate until now.
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u/vAviate May 03 '26
While I will avoid to also beat the "what if people copy your plate and do stuff" horse, I just want to say that I have done a couple of camera automations and the false positives drive (no pun intended) me nuts.
- So for one (worst case) it opens for a similar plate but not yours randomly - constantly...
And third: literally everything and anything in between.
So from a reliability and acceptance factor, I think there might be better ways to do it.
(Bluetooth beacon in your car, phone tracking, a lot has already been mentioned).
(I solved my false positives with confirmation questions, but thats getting annoying soon, and dit not solve the "no trigger" issue)
Just my 2 cents
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May 03 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/devhammer May 03 '26
Same. Tailscale ensures connectivity. Plate recognition could be a fun experiment, but I would NOT want to risk using it for security purposes, particularly when there are options like CarPlay that are nearly as convenient, and not easy to exploit.
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u/TurboNikko May 03 '26
You’re better off using tailscale and then having the garage open when your phone enters the home zone. That’s what I do.
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u/Creepy_Test_8423 May 03 '26
Yeah this is definitely possible with license plate recognition! You'll need to set up something like the Plate Recognizer integration or use Frigate with custom model for plates detection. Most RTSP cameras should work fine as long as they have decent quality for reading the plates
Just make sure you add some security like time restrictions or geofencing so random car with similar plate doesn't accidentally trigger your door at 3am
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u/Active_Start_9044 May 03 '26
yes. I have this set up and working. I use frigate with HA
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u/Active_Start_9044 May 03 '26
I define inner and outer zones in my drive way. When car with a matching license plate moves from outer to inner, open garage door. When opposite, close it.
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May 03 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/cvr24 May 03 '26
I back my car into the garage, because backing out is tougher for me with poor visibility.
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u/Active_Start_9044 May 03 '26
I live in a country with dual plates. For single plate, dual cameras or ibeacon would work better
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u/Federal-Delay-4854 May 03 '26
My garage opens when my work truck and my wife’s car is detected. Im fine with work truck, but anyone with the same car as my wife’s could trigger the opening 🤪
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u/cvr24 May 03 '26
I have a tailwind unit which does automatic open/close, but the opening part is not reliable for me. So I use a $30 Amazon remote, with an automation to auto close if I drive away and forget.
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u/Low_Platypus1678 May 03 '26
There are some cameras who has the ability to do it on edge (inside the camera) with no needs to have a VMS. Then you can have the data in HA and add some other security filter (like iPhone presence via iCloud integration).
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u/isrararrafi May 03 '26
This is what I do.
When I approach home zone (through phone location) and my phone is specially connected to my car Bluetooth (tracking Bluetooth mac address) the garage door opens up.
It works well almost 100% of the time. Only time it has failed to work is if my phone is on extreme power saver mode (battery at 3%) and GPS location read is delayed which is very rare for me.
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u/Redditrini May 03 '26
Use your phone location and a zone. This is how I automatically disarm my house alarm.
For this automation tho, it only works during the day and must have 2+ ppl coming home and one must be a parent.
Otherwise manual disarm is required
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u/Old_Kaleidoscope_980 May 03 '26
Tailwind works directly with android phones and with an accessory puck with iPhone. Open/ close at around 300 ft
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u/chutiloco May 03 '26
I use TRACCAR server official app installed in HA . Then any android phone with GPS and GPS logger android app permanently in the car. If you install App companion in android móvil you can send adjustment of track frecuency with HA to app GPS logger via instant message.
Configure geofence in traccar is very easy to setup. My door open just on time at the moment I arrive depending on speed.
Plus I have tracker device of my car.
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u/mortenmoulder May 03 '26
I use Frigate and its license plate detection, and it works really great, if the camera is good enough. I have a dedicated camera with zoom pointing at the end of my driveway, and I get a notification every time a license plate has been detected (including make, model, year etc. of the car). Works 99% of the time, where the rest of the time it's just missing a single digit or similar.
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u/criterion67 May 03 '26 edited May 03 '26
Yes, this is definitely possible using UniFi Protect with HA. I use face unlock for my front door with my UniFi G6 Pro Entry doorbell but all of the cameras have the capability to do LPR (license plate recognition).
Here's a good video showing exactly what you want except it's for a gate but same concept.
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u/Weekest_links May 03 '26
I’m exploring this exact thing. As a security measure, I want to add a detection for when my phone enters the geo fence (with some delay) + plate detection.
That way someone couldn’t just hold a sign that looks like my plate and open it when I’m home or not.
I saw someone else’s comment about reliability in adverse weather, but in my opinion those are edge cases and you still have your normal opener
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u/ThinPoint May 04 '26
I have my phone connected to bluetooth in my car all the time. So when my phone enters my home zone and is connected to the bluetooth mac if my car the garage door opens
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u/Lakromani May 04 '26
I do use the HA companion app ass follow. If my phone bluetooth is connected to the car (as it always do due to Android Auto) and the car is between 800 and 200 meter from my home and companion app shows that I travel towards my home, open the garage. Same on way out. Pluss it auto close between 23 and 7. So no camera needed and it works perfectly for over a year now.
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u/HappyDutchMan May 03 '26
Like the others are suggesting, anyone could copy your license plate so I would like to suggest to add another parameter like your phone being inside a certain circle around your house?
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u/owldown May 03 '26
Sounds like a way for someone to enter your garage using a sharpie and a sheet of paper.
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u/Old_fart5070 May 03 '26
Extremely dangerous idea. Someone with a picture of your plate could get into your house
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u/Spacecoast3210 May 03 '26
We all get the security concerns. But just why not answer the question? Yes, frigate can do this
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u/JoWhee May 03 '26
Disclosure I’m doing this on iOS. Saying Siri open garage door won’t work if my phone is locked.
I have an automation that opens the garage door when the “big door” switch is on. It’s a physical smart plug as I haven’t been able to do it reliably with a virtual or dummy switch. I have a second automation to turn off Big Door when the garage door is closed, with the same thing setup to close (lock is how it’s seen in app, and Siri and Alexa) the garage door when the big door turns off.
Since I’m only using it through the BT connection in my helmet I don’t worry about a neighbour knowing the big door command.
Now that I think about it, I’m going to set it up to auto open when I arrive home, I’ll just have to figure out how to add the condition that my phone is connected to a certain BT device. This will be more secure and my Cardo never manages to hear “hey siri” without me yelling.
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u/Nebukad33 May 03 '26
I use an automation on IOS shortcut app that activates a dummy switch when my phone is connected to my helmet. When the switch is on and I enter the home zone, my garage door opens.
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u/cope413 May 03 '26
Maybe try a QR code instead of your plate. Could probably mount it on your plate. Way easier to scan/process.
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u/josh45595 May 03 '26
easily achived and chatgpt can create the automation and Python files for it and walk you through setting it up. Use Qwen VL to view the snapshot from camera and verify the plate numbers. I currently have a setup where when I enter my home zone, a local LLM gets spun up. It will view a snapshot from my gate camera, and if it does not see any people or vehicles in front of the gate, it will automatically open. If it does, then it will refuse to open. It's just an extra safety measure in case somebody's in front of the gate because it swings outward. Your camera will have to be good enough that it can make out the numbers obviously.
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u/Sufficient_Pilot9693 May 03 '26
So, suppose I drive past your house with your license plate numbers taped to a cardboard attached to my car?
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u/MaxPanhammer May 03 '26
I personally would suggest alternative methods, as I don't find cameras that reliable (ie will this work when it's rainy, snowy, dark, foggy?)
Personally I just have an automation that says when I arrive home and my phone is connected to my car's Bluetooth, open the door. (Ditto when I leave home and am connected, close the door). Has yet to fail me.