NOTICE: This is for information purposes only. I will not be held responsible for any damaged caused by attempting this at home. Now I got that out of the way!
Hello everyone!
I just wanted to share my experience with the GD00Z-4 and my garage door opener.I have a Craftsman DC drive with battery backup that has a purple button on the unit. The wall switch is one of those ones that reads temp, senses motion, programs keyfob’s, and locks out the drive. When I went to connect my GD00Z-4 parallel with this switch nothing would happen when I initiated the command. The light on the device would strobe as if it was closing the door but nothing would happen. I tried connecting the GD00Z directly by itself and it would operate the door as intended. Doing a little research, I am not the only one with this issue. The wall switch requires power all of the time and sends a signal when it is asked to close/open the door. Due to the circuitry of the GD00Z it interferes with the operation.
My first option was to run a simple relay that acted like a simple switch. It would essentially close the contact shorting the pins to the wall switch and close/open the door. The issue with this is that the wall switch would reset every time this occurred. Not a huge deal but annoying. So using a couple of other ideas I came up with the solution below.
The items I used for this were the following:
12VDC wall wart power supply for a router.
12VDC relay (mine is an industrial application but a simple automotive one would work)
GD00Z-4
Liftmaster 980Max (purchased on ebay)
The first picture is everything laid out. My original intention was to remove the circuit board out of the 980MAX and put it in the black box in picture one. (If you did some research on this you may have come across a device that looks exactly like this.) This required some modification to the pcb that I didn’t have time to investigate so I decided to keep the 980 as is.
The second picture shows how I soldered the wires into the 980MAX. Color doesn’t matter I just did this because that is what I had laying around. You must be very careful that you don’t solder jump them together or to the case of the push button switch. I drilled a small hold in the back of the switch to allow the wires to exit. Remove the battery before soldering! Before I started I set the 980 up for my type of garage door opener. This device is just about compatible with all garage door openers. Once the soldering was completed I tested it’s function by simply touching the ends of the wires coming out together.
The third picture is everything mounted at the door opener. The nice thing about this set up is that it doesn’t have to be mounted near the opener (that is just where I started my install). Because you are using a wireless remote you can install it anywhere the remote reaches. Although the GD00z should be mounted near the opening/closing door due to it’s annunciation features. The advantage of the relay I used is that it mounts to a piece of din rail and also has screw terminals. The screw terminals make the connections super easy. The same thing can be accomplished on an automotive relay it just will take some crimp caps. The 890MAX was just stuck to the side of the relay with 2 sided 3m automotive trim tape.
The last picture is the schematic of everything. I did a quick hand sketch on the back of the directions for the opener. It isn’t the fanciest but I think it gets the job done!
If anyone has any questions don’t hesitate to ask. There was a lot of information out there about this but I feel this is the easiest.
Schematic.pdf (3.44 MB)