what am i doing

I commute on an electric bike almost entirely. I love doing it. It's fun, thrilling, and just as fast as a car (mostly because i ride a bike that is 100% perfectly legal, not illegal or anything. definitely doesn't have a 3.2kw motor.)

I am Lazy.

I store said electric bike in a garage. The garage has a garage door and a normal door. I dislike having to park my bike, walk in, open the garage, park my bike, and then close the garage again. Takes way too much effort honestly.

No, I don't have a button to connect. The landlord said it doesn't connect.

I do have a relay and a bunch of LoRa boards, though.

This has brought me to an idea:

control the door over LoRa.

i'm kinda cheating, honestly

I made a similar project for the same purpose recently. I used a Particle boron404x and a Particle Photon 2, with the boron communicating over cellular and the photon then relaying all the messages over MQTT to my Home Assistant instance. That was a bad idea. I slightly wrote my code wrong and it used 85% of my allotted requests in three days. Oops. The delay was also horrible and the particle platform was just weird to interact with. I love it and will be selling a bunch of projects based on them to my city, but I don't think it's the right tool for home use.

So I'm going to switch to LoRa. I did a little test for about 10 minutes just to see if P2P LoRa was a good idea, and it worked beautifully.

lorawan

I barely know what LoRa is, so of course I'm going to try and use something to wrap around it, LoRaWAN. It connects to the internet and lets you do shenanigans with the internet over LoRa.

I think I'm going to use The Things Network, but I might see if I can selfhost ChirpStack. No clue which is better, or which supports Home Assistant the best.