If you own a Chamberlain LiftMaster garage door opener, and have attempted to use its integrated MyQ service in your smart home—particularly with Home Assistant—you already know that MyQ is one of the IoT industry’s preeminent DFaaS (Dumpster Fire as a Service) providers. This past week, The Verge broke the news that Chamberlain is now officially blocking the previously public MyQ API to 3rd party developers, which effectively renders everyone’s MyQ based home automations useless.
Fortunately, a superhero named Paul Wieland figured out how to locally control LiftMaster garage door openers by using a cheap microcontroller board running open-source software, which totally eliminates the need for the cloud-only MyQ service. The project is called ratgdo (“Rage Against the Garage Door Opener”), and since the Verge posted their article, Paul’s poor inbox has probably been hit with an unintentional distributed denial-of-service attack, with thousands of orders for ratgdo boards that Paul actually builds and ships himself.
I was fortunate to have ordered a set of boards a few months ago, and finally received them yesterday after being backordered for months. But as someone who has never tinkered with garage door openers before, I found the wiring instructions a bit confusing, as did many others on Reddit and the Home Assistant forum. So in response to several posters asking for a video tutorial on wiring up a ratgdo board, I made this embarrassingly amateurish video walkthrough that explains the process.