I designed a custom wireless ZigBee carport controller, in order to minimize risk of accidentally locking ourselves out of the house. I decided to use the XBEE3 MMT chip, as these are compact, easy to use and receive regular firmware updates from the manufacturer Digi. They also support security features and have AES encrypted communication.

Opening and closing the carport from a custom PCB is fairly straight forward, just add another switch in parallel with the one that's already installed in the wall. I however also wanted a feedback, to check if the carport is fully closed or not.

After checking my carports manual, I discovered that it had a 24V output, which get's enabled whenever the port is fully closed. So this signal is high, when the port is closed. This signal is low, when the ports is opened or not fully closed.

Designing the circuitboard was a fairly straightforward concept. I decided on using micro USB as power connector, as these are easier to solder than USB-C.

Three screw-clamps where added, one as 24V input for carport open/closed readout. The two other screw-clamps are used to connect the pcb in-between switch and carport. Which makes installation easy and neat, without additional external wire-clamps.

I 3D printed a small enclosure, in order to cleanly mount the circuitboard to my carport. The enclosure itself is printed using Prusament Galaxy black, the top-lid is printed using fillamentum transparent filament. I also printed the screws in the same transparent filament, as this looks cleaner than metal screws.

<WRAP center round tip 60%> Print screws always on 0.1 mm layer height, as 0.2 mm lacks the required precision. </WRAP>

<WRAP center round todo 60%> This project is still a work in progress, more information will be added to this page after installation has been finalized. </WRAP>