Insignia™ - Wi-Fi Garage Door Controller for Apple® HomeKit™ - White

Having used the MyQ and Aladdin Connect. The insignia wins. I hope that at some point insignia will give this an Alexia skill and an android app, but that’s only because why not. As far as it working with HomeKit it does it works quite well $69 is cheap and the least expensive route to HomeKit. Very pleased with it and easy easy easy installation. Did I mention easy installation and setup, did I actually do a setup? Obviously but it was completely painless! The only issue is where the home kit sticker is located. It is blocked while garage door opener plugged, not really a problem but more of a overlooked detail.

TL;DR Adding a 0.5" (1.27cm) thick piece of wood between the sensor and a metal garage door fixed my problems. I attached a photo of my sensor installation. I installed this system the day before Thanksgiving 2019. Before purchasing, I had read the mixed reviews, including the helpful modification suggested by Joparad. I was hoping for the best, but somewhat expected trouble. I decided to give it a shot because it was on sale and I knew I could return it if it didn't work out. Installation was a piece of cake, but unfortunately right away I experienced inconsistent behavior. Sometimes everything worked as expected, other times the Apple Home app would say there was an obstruction or the door was closing when in fact there were no obstructions and/or the door was closed fully. I tried the recommendation proposed by Joparad (shim the bottom of the door sensor a bit to change its angle), but unfortunately that did not work in my application. This is still a good suggestion and may work for other people -- particularly if your door has a bit of angle to it. There is a metal ball tilt sensor on the printed circuit board -- you can hear it when you move it around. It sounds a bit like a small baby rattle. I called Best Buy customer support. I reached a human very quickly, but as expected their play book for troubleshooting was pretty limited and I had already done the usual things. He suggested returning it to the store for an exchange. Before doing that, I decided to see if I could figure out why it was behaving inconsistently. looked closely at the sensor electronics assembly which is visible when you remove the screw to the cover to access its battery. I noticed that the antenna on the door sensor is very close to the door itself. In my case the grage door is made of metal so I wondered if perhaps the antenna was being detuned or its radiation pattern impacted by the metal door in close proximity. I wondered if perhaps the sensor and the controller were having RF communication problems. I don't know the details of how frequently the two try and communicate with one another. I decided to try spacing the sensor away from the metal door by adding a roughly 0.5" (1.27cm) thick piece of wood in between the door and the sensor. I'm glad to report that after doing that, the system has worked flawlessly for 4 days -- with over 50 up/down cycles. If you have a metal door, you may want to try out this solution. I hope it helps a few other people get the expected experience from this otherwise pretty simple and useful product. Taking away 1 star because the product did not work as expected without me needing to home brew an adjustment to make it work. If I had not had that problem I would have given it 5/5 stars.

I FIGURED OUT THE “OBSTRUCTION DETECTED” ISSUE PPL ARE HAVING. I got the item on sale for $45, and decided to give it a shot despite some issues reported here. Installation was easy! But when I used Apple HomeKit to open and close the garage door, it would work BUT the status of the garage was incorrect whenever the door was closed. HomeKit would say it’s “closing” or “obstruction detected” even though the door was completely shut. I felt that it was an issue with the sensor on the door because when I was playing around with the sensor before I installed it, tilting the sensor in my hand back and forth would cause HomeKit to show the door “open” or “closed” properly. I suspected that the level in the sensor was off a few degrees so it thought the door was slightly tilted open even though it was closed. So I reinstalled the sensor with some shimming on the bottom edge to make it tilt up very slightly as shown in the pic. Now it works perfectly. 3 stars for a decent product with subpar construction and for making me waste all this time figuring it out! I would recommend it if you can get it cheaper for the $45 I paid.