About a month ago, the family had an automatic door installed at the front of the farm. Nothing too fancy — the typical garage-style gate with a remote. It definitely improved things, but it also introduced a new problem.
We could be home, far away from the gate, when someone would try to come in. Since the gate is now electronically closed most of the time, that meant someone had to walk all the way back to it, remote in hand, just to let them through.
When my brother visited a couple of weeks ago, he asked me why I hadn’t done something about it yet.
“We can automate this,” he said. “We can make an app and trigger a relay remotely.”
That’s when he introduced me to Mosquitto, a fascinating little service, and before I knew it, we were poking around the gate’s circuit board. After about ten minutes of careful trial and error, we found the exact lines that needed to be shorted to trigger the gate opening and closing.
I still have a few micro-computers lying around — gifts from my brother over the years for small experiments. Among them are a couple of Orange Pi 3 LTS boards. One of them is probably on its way to becoming e-waste, but the other keeps going despite the weather and general abuse.
Getting Armbian running took about an hour, mostly because I kept discovering damaged SD cards. Once it finally booted properly, it was time to drive my brother back to the city. He had a flight to catch.
Even after he left, the idea kept growing in both our heads. We started talking about how cool it would be to expand this little gate project: license plate recognition, entry logs for residents, automatic closures so the gate wouldn’t stay open too long.
Ambitious? Definitely. But my brother still managed to cook up an MVP during his days off before the year ticked over. He showed me the repo, and I poked around under the hood, but it wasn’t until today that I finally got the board running his service.
A few hours — and plenty of troubleshooting — later, it worked.
Well… an MVP worked. And that’s good enough for now. I’ll probably be installing it on the gate tomorrow.
What’s left is authentication — and that’s where Hive comes in.
I don’t want just anyone stumbling onto my app (which will probably be a simple PWA hosted on Vercel) and opening and closing our gate for fun. I need to know who opened it and when. I need to be able to enable or disable access.
You catch my drift...
Hive and custom JSONs?
From where I’m standing, the authentication piece makes perfect sense. Using Hive Keychain in the browser, I could install the app on my family’s phones. They already have Hive accounts, so that part is done. Logging activity via custom JSONs would be trivial.
This might sound confusing — especially if you’ve never heard of Mosquitto.
Mosquitto is a lightweight MQTT message broker that sits in the middle of devices and apps. Clients publish messages to topics, and Mosquitto delivers those messages to all clients subscribed to the same topics, efficiently and in real time.
A clever little thing, right?
At any rate, I’m doing this. It’s practically already done — at least the meat and potatoes. But as I keep maturing the idea in my head, I can’t help but laugh a little.
Is there anything I can’t somehow tie to Hive?
Maybe I am a Hive maximalist after all.
Up next: Hive-powered breakfast.
That one… I’m going to have to think about for a while.
— MenO