Alexa, is the Garage Door open? (IFTTT, API with Wyze Sense)

I love my Wyze cameras and now my Wyze Sense. After Installing my brand new contact sensors, I went to check if the Alexa skill will discover them. Sadly they were not there. This is when I went down the rabbit hole of creating a “solution”. I’m going to describe two methods I created to allow Alexa to know whether my garage door is open or closed. Yeah, yeah, I know I can open my app and check, but with Alexa and Google home I can always be lazier right :wink:

For both methods, I developed my own Alexa Smart Home Skill (there is plenty of documentation if you are a dev, but if requested I can create a guide later). The skill is not published so its only available for my personal Amazon Echos.

1.- IFTTT. The first method was to create a IFTTT recipe that will update a DynamoDB record for each of my sensors. The recipe is very simple. “If Any Contact Sensor closes/opens, then Make a web request” aka webhook. I created a nodejs Lambda that receives the events and logs the state on the DB. Now I can query the remote DB to know if the garage door is open.

2.- API. Doing some app traffic sniffing plus finding the previous work of GitHub - nblavoie/wyzecam-api: Wyzecam API reverse engineered to support Wyzecam alternatives applications., I was able to create a simple mobile API wrapper for node GitHub - noelportugal/wyze-node: An un-official API wrapper for Wyze products. Now instead of relying on IFTTT to update my DynamoDB, I can directly ask the API for the status of my garage door! Also with this method I can dynamically add/remove sensors for Alexa to discover.

Finally here is the Lambda node.js code I’m using to power my Smart Home Skill: GitHub - noelportugal/wyze-smart-home: Wyze Smart Home Node.js Lambda.

*Note that, I’m a developer and if you are trying to do something similar, you will need to dive in into code :slight_smile: but, don’t be afraid! Sometimes it is through passion projects that we learn to do new things.

**There are still some hurdles with the mobile API. Since understandably was not created as a supported public API. Hopefully our favorite Wyze team can create a proper public API! After all they are halfway there!

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Wow deff wish I could understand this🤷‍♀️

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This is awesome! It would definitely be helpful if you could create a guide for actually setting up the skill

I do hope this gets integrated into the official Wyze skill soon

They should make a full smart garage door opener
I have a meross but would love to have all one company

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Hopefully you wouldn’t mind putting up a quick guide in setting this up.

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I’d love to know how to do this as well. Might as well put Alexa to work.

Silly me. I just mounted a v.2 Camera inside my garage. Problem solved, and then some.

I replaced a no name door sensor that worked on the tuya/smart life app with a Wyze Sense. With the first sensor, I could ask Alexa if the door was opened or closed, no complicated setup, it just worked “out of the box”. Was shocked to find no native support for this with the Wyze sense. I control the door closer with a $15 sonoff inching switch, works like a charm.

Someone must work in in devops :stuck_out_tongue:

Thanks for the link for that api project. I’ll be checking it out and seeing what’s possible. Good work!

The automatic garage door solution would be something I’d like to see. I’ve installed 1 by another company that had a wired sensor that you had to run to the door to determine if the door was closed or not.

The newer ones don’t appear to have the wired sensor to the door, and instead you just put a sticker on the door and it reflects light off of it.

If Wyze made a similar solution and put a fisheye camera facing down it would provide your wyze environment with a lot of information you could also section off different area’s if you had a two car garage or something.

Maybe the nest pan camera can have an add-on to do most of the heavy lifting and the folks at wyze just a device to close the door open/close switch.