Remote Controlled Door

April 10, 2008

Remote Controlled Door

I have gotten a lot of requests on how my door opener worked so I decided to post a small tutorial and story about it. I love electronics and computers and I wanted a way to easily yet, effectively make something that used both together so I decided to make this.

At first, I started by figuring out how the mechanics of it would all work. I didn’t have counter weights or motors at this point. I didn’t plan this out at all, I started placing eye hooks on the wall of the close position of the door and the open position of the door. I also put eye hooks on the door it’s self. I placed all these eye hooks at the top of the door where it would be best out of the way. After manually opening and closing the door with the fishing line I used, I wanted to be able to still freely open and close the door. So after about 30 minutes I discovered counter weights and how they would be the base of the entire project.

Check out the video demonstration.

I filled two water bottles with water then popcorn seed to be able to better measure the counter pull of the door so the door would not always want to stay open or stay closed. So the bottles had to be equal to each other, light enough that it wouldn’t kill the motors, and heavy enough that they would keep tension on the line and keep the motors unwound.

As for the motors, I used two Lego motors form a Lego Mindstorms kit. I put them on a thin Lego platform and geared them to about 1/15. I’m not good with gear ratios but it had way more power and it was a bit slower. I took about 7 seconds to pull up the counter weight and open or close the door.

The controller that allowed my computer to give power to each motor was a PC Relay Driver Board - K74V2. You can get it at, http://www.electronickits.com/kit/complete/elec/ck1601.htm, where I got mine. It was about $60 for me but now it’s $35 assembled or $30 as a kit. It comes with software to make batch files or you can use the small GUI.

Here is a short video of the door opening and closing. Download

Filed under: Hardware Hacks, Projects |