A couple, who are friends of mine have a rod-iron, gated driveway that they want to put an automatic gate opener/closer on. Right now, everyone has to get out of their vehicle and roll the gate open and closed manually. They asked me for help setting something up and i was looking for an off-the-shelf solution, but my search was fruitless and a custom solution seemed daunting. Since watching your show, I'm certain that it can be built and be much cooler that anything in the stores.
They have city power at the gate, so power isn't a problem. The gate is about 150 feet from the house. I was thinking of a mod'ed, 2 way, long range intercom system. this site has some good candidates: http://www.intercomsonline.com/Wireless-Intercom-s/20.htm.
Here are the features that i envision:
- Call box at the street rings the home phone, so the home owners can respond to guests easily with a familiar device. They are non-techies. Distinctive ring maybe for intercom calls? If distinctive ring is possible, then how about a special ring indicator for when the gate reaches the closed position, starts an open cycle or faults.
- To open the gate, from the phone handset, the owners enter a code that the remote station can decode via modem functionality. I am a ham radio guy, so I am confident about transmitting data that way using a TNC (terminal Node Controller, a modem)
- For the owners to open the gate from their vehicles, a garage door type remote that sends the same modulated code as the phone handset. The same site above has handheld transcievers that could be mod'ed and shrunk to a smaller size.
- I think for emergency purposes a manual gate release is needed.
- For the gate limit sensors, i think the usual limit switches for open and close positions are needed and it will probably need an infra-red beam sensor to detect obstructions in the way of a gate close cycle like a garage door.
