ismartgate LITE Smart Gate Opener Remote, APP Control, Compatible with Apple Homekit, Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and IFTTT. Compatible with All Gates. Wireless sensor included.

Only about 1 week in but I have to say I am very impressed. I had always wanted to connect my driveway gate to homekit and had been thinking about trying to do it myself with homebridge and a ras pi or something for years but never had time. Then I discovered this and it seriously fit the bill and works well. It also appears to be the only real option so I'm glad it is good.Attached it to an Apollo 636 board. ismartgate provides an impressive array of install instructions for all different kinds of gate boards. Provided wiring in my case was long enough but it is relatively short at around 6 inches.Tying into homekit and ITTT (other than dumb quirks about ITTT) was easy. Via ITTT webhook I was able to integrate this gate with Twilio and get the gate its own number and setup a virtual call box that lets ppl in based on their caller id or code that they enter and then texts me about who entered. This is really cool and very cheap and was what I always wanted to do. However the Twilio integration will definitely not be easy to setup if you don't know how to use Twilio and basic programming.Wifi range seems pretty impressive. I setup a unifi mesh AP pretty close to gate which gives it really good signal but I noticed when that mesh was powered down it actually picked up a faint signal from the house about 300 ft away and through trees and still worked ok (indicating around -83 RSSI). I did not test at length in this scenario though.Support always responded within 24 hours via email and articulately answered my questions and feedback both before and after buying.Once I got this fully setup correctly, this thing has worked perfectly.It's nice you can demo their video plugin for 1 month before buying. I really appreciate this. It turned out not to be for me. I could not get it to readily show clips for events when gate was opened. Not sure if it can actually do this or only a live view but I didnt try too hard as I already have a good setup with synology surveillance station and using homekit I made an automation that triggers a webhook on synology to record 30 second whenever gate is opened.Biggest con- Gate magnet sensor is extremely sensitive and requires the magnet be very close.The sensor you place to know when gate is open vs closed is way too sensitive in my opinion. I have a one arm gate that swings open and turns out that the end of my gate that opens does not always come back to the exact same closing spot. This sensor requires it basically comes back to same spot with in a few mm and my gate varied by up to an inch. This led to inaccurate states where it thought gate never closed or that it briefly closed and reopened. This can then throw off other things like homekit which isn't going to trigger to open the gate if it thinks it open already.Fortunately I realized I had a spot on my gate arm that I could attach the sensor to and it works perfectly so far in this spot. If you are not so lucky this could be a big problem but I bet that you could get another after market magnet that might work better by providing a wider range. Also maybe you can just not setup the sensor and then the state works differently such that it will use time to guess when open vs close but Im not sure.Minor cons- older firmware that mine came with can't use wifi passwords with $ in themI did have a lot of trouble setting it up at first because it turned out there was a bug in older firmware that won't allow it to connect to wifi networks with $ in password. I setup a new network without one which was easy for me to do. I let support know after the fact and they confirmed that it has been fixed in a new update. My ismartgate did in fact indicate a firmware update after I got it connected but unfortunately if yours comes with this bug you have to get it online somehow to update it.- On its own, cannot keep gates open and leave them openismartgate cannot keep gates open and leave them open in most cases. This seems basically due to the fact that the general way it integrates with gate boards is in a way that just is allows it to trigger signal that the board handles same as it does a press from a key fob ect. While it may be possible to connect in another way on some boards, the instruction do not attempt to go into that level of custom detail for different gate manufacturers. This was a bummer but not really ismartgate's fault given breadth of their market.But it occurred to me that in my case I could get around this by putting a generic homekit smart AC plug that feeds my gate board's power but not the ismartgate power. Then I made a homekit automation/ shortcut that triggers gate to open, wait's 15 seconds (for gate to open) and then turns power off on smart plug such that the apollo gate control cannot shut the gate. Then made a similar shortcut to close the gate from this state. This has worked perfectly for times I need to leave the gate open. Note that with homekit shortcuts to work all the time, you need an appletv or ipad that acts as the homekit hub that is on the same network (or network that gets mDNS broadcasts from the gate network) and triggers the automations when your phone is away. Typically for this use though you would likely have phone at home on same network.

While I prefer matter enabled devices (as opposed to wifi), I'm content with this purchase. A couple of install choices are available; I chose to share connection with wall mounted garage door opener as opposed to directly to ceiling mounted opener. Connecting to Apple Home was relatively easy although I don't understand why there is not an alternative method of adding it to Homekit without using the company's proprietary app.

Was looking for something to remote control my older Viking Systems gate on the house we just bought. This items works perfectly and was easy to setup, also integrates with all the major smart home platforms so you can integrate into various automation (i.e., geofencing). Only major requirement is it needs a electrical outlet at the gate, but since gates are powered you should be able to rig something up to pull from what's already there. I highly recommend this product.

It would be hard to overstate how bad the experience of using this has been. A brief summary of the issues that finally convinced us to eat the cost of it and find a replacement:1. The wireless sensor cannot maintain a connection to the base station. Support claims the maximum distance is 15 meters and we've placed ours at about 4 meters. Nevertheless, we receive "the connection to your sensor has been lost" *emails* at least 5 times a day. (Yes! Emails!)2. Speaking of those emails, getting between 5 and 10 daily is quite annoying! I asked support how we might deactivate them and was told that, as a security measure, you cannot. (Did you know that incessant prodding was for your protection? We were surprised to discover this!) This forced me—for the first time in my life—to set up a spam filter to block messages from a service I've paid to (ostensibly) benefit from. Wild stuff.3. The above issues fell into the "annoying, but tolerable" category, but this did not: every week or so the base station loses its connection to our wifi. Incredibly, it has no protocol for reconnecting after losing its connection (like millions of other smart devices do). The only way to reconnect it to our network is to physically open our gate box and cycle power on the unit. The combo of having to a) scramble for the old-school remote to enter our property because our fancy "smart" opener has gone quite dumb, followed by b) having to pop open the gate box to cycle power (to buy us another week of use before we have to repeat the sequence) was enough to break us. Do this sequence 10 to 20 times and see if you last.Anyway, it's gone now—I encourage prospective buyers to skip to the end and avoid it entirely!

The software for this is abysmal. Once you get it working though it’s fine. Nice to use Siri to open the garage door.