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The great garage refresh of 2018

Where we Started

The garage had years worth of stuff packed into every corner, and hadn’t seen a car actually parked in it for quite some time. I wouldn’t allow my shiny new car to bake in the driveway, so initially it seemed obvious that a clean-out and maybe some paint on the walls and cabinets was in order.

: Garage full of stuff

First Attempt

At first all I really wanted to do was paint the walls and cabinets, and clean up the junk that I had accumulated over the years. As the space cleared out and I went to painting, I started noticing how the cabinets weren’t really in great shape, and were starting to crumble. I went to painting anyway, but realized quickly that there wasn’t going to be much of an improvement. I got through a couple walls, but didn’t even get to painting the cabinets. I knew this was going to become a much bigger project…

: Wall primed

: Two-Tone colored wall

Tearing it all Down

The cabinets were garbage. I ripped out all the cabinetry, and then was faced with bare studs that would need some drywall. The garage had previously been a carport, and so the walls it did have were exterior walls or just bare studs. These exterior walls were 1/2″ wood with slats, and I finally broke down and ripped all that out as well. The covering of the uneven wall along the house came out and revealed a door and a window that had been covered over on the other side during a previous remodel. One wall after another, I kept tearing more and more down until I had pulled almost all walls, with the exception of half the wall running along the house, down to the studs.

: Old cabinets need to go

: Cabinet junk to re-home

: Stripped cabinets

: Exterior wall stripped

: Back wall stripped

: Window behind wall

: Door behind wall

Adding more Power

While the studs were exposed, I added electrical outlets to the outside and back walls, and ran the power line up to the attic. I also added a pair of 8′ LED strip lights which look like fluorescent fixtures to give the room a brilliant white light. This lighting alone was a major improvement both for working in the garage as well as the finished product.

I had an electrician come in to wire up the outlets to a new 20-Amp breaker, as well as wire a new circuit to an 80-Amp Tesla wall charger unit which would live on the back wall of the garage. We had a few surprises – my electrical box is 3-phase, wasn’t grounded, and needed some work to fit some new breakers. We got through it in a few days, but between the Tesla wall charger, parts, and labor the whole endeavor set me back just over $2,000.

: Glamour shot with box

: Temporary wall mount

: Ready for power wiring

: Horrible electrical box

: Wires thru attic

: Powered and ready

Building it Back Up

I framed out the half of the previously uneven wall against the house. The garage is notoriously an oven in the summer, so I decided to insulate all the walls and the attic while I had the opportunity. The ceilings are 8′ high, so I initially put in drywall strips vertically (they come 8′ x 4′). About the time I finished I found out that I should be putting a 1/2″ gap between the floor and the drywall, and also using special ‘green board’ drywall which is treated to resist moisture. I ripped all my hard work out and started again with new green board. There were some ceiling gaps that I fixed up along the back wall due to the prior 1/2″ wood boards being thicker than my new 1/4″ drywall.

To mud and tape the drywall together, I hired a professional. That is an art in itself, and I figured for all my work I wouldn’t want to do a bad job here and not get the benefit of clean/smooth walls. Had him mud the entire ceiling while he was in there, to get rid of the prior texture and some other holes and cracks that needed to go. $950 later I had something starting to resemble a legitimate garage again.

: Home Depot Merch

: Ready to rock

: Framed house wall

: Insulated house wall

: Insulating the back door

: Insulated other wall

: Insulated outside wall

: Better outside wall shot

: More Insulation…

: Drywall for outside wall

: Contiguous house wall

: Lots of greenboard now

: More drywall

: Back and outside walls

: Outside wall

: Ceiling patching

: More Ceiling Patching

: Mud/Tape Sanding

: Don’t Breathe this stuff

: Ceiling Insulation

: 10 bags=way too much

Finishing the Job

Painting the walls was easy, but painting the ceiling was much more difficult than expected. I stayed up many nights until 2AM just painting, and the excitement as it started to look like a showroom fueled me to push hard. With the walls painted, the floor became an instant eye-sore. It quickly became apparent I was going to need to go all the way and epoxy the floor. The idea of a showroom look had taken hold, so I committed to going with a white color.

The prep work and application of the epoxy floor took as much time as the walls. I ground down the floors with a large grinder rented from the Home Depot. I ground down along the walls by hand using a hand grinder. Then I acid washed the entire garage to prep the concrete. Then I spent hours sealing cracks in the concrete to ensure a smooth surface. This process alone spanned weeks and cost a couple hundred dollars. The actual epoxy (two coats) and associated sealer/hardener (also two coats) cost around $600 and also spanned over a week due to curing time between coats.

The very final step was trim, which I waited several weeks before knocking out. Simple white, pre-primed trim pieces went up in an afternoon, and after a quick bead of silicon caulking I was finally done.

: Garage door painted

: Handy Paint Reference

: Walls and ceiling done

: Rented a floor grinder

: Grinding is super messy

: Ground down floor

: Drying after acid wash

: Epoxy and hardner

: Epoxy applied

: Adding trim

: Finer trim work

Completed Garage Renovation

Overall Thoughts Now that it’s done

At the outset if you told me I would spend over $5,000 to renovate my garage, I likely wouldn’t have started at all. But that’s not how great projects work. This garage is awesome, and makes me happy. Sometimes I go out to my car, stop, and pull out my phone to take a picture or two. It looks walking into a showroom every day. It’s worth it, and I hope for everyone to have something that brings them recurring joy like this. It’s a prefect compliment to the car, which also brings me boundless joy.

For those wondering or hating on the white floor – I mop it once a week and it looks brand new again after three months. The car doesn’t drip random oil or other fluids on the ground, so at worst you end up with some tire tracks after a few days. If you live somewhere rainy, your mileage may vary. In Phoenix Arizona it’s not bad.

Future Stuff

I would very much like to install three of the Tesla PowerWalls and some solar. Beyond the energy benefits, the visual design of those PowerWalls would really look amazing along that red wall in the garage.

I need to build a home for my bike, which is now living in the back yard. It’s covered, but it’s also an expensive machine that shouldn’t be left outside. I already have some plans for this – look for that in another post soon.

Garage Door Opener Project: Part 1

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So a few weekends ago I decided that I’d like to embark on a fun project of making a network enabled garage door opener. A few weeks ago I was walking home from a neighbors, and found myself wishing I could open the garage from my phone, or ideally from my Band. This seemed like enough of a pretense to embark on a new project, and after a few weeks of tinkering I’ve emerged with the following working home accessory:

The Plan

When I started this project, I laid out a few key requirements:

Build an application targeting an existing Wi-Fi enabled Raspberry Pi I had laying around.
Build and debug the application on the Pi, and write it in modern C++.
Setup Git on the Pi, and keep the code up in GitHub.
Breadboard the hardware required to switch the garage light and door.
Integrate a temperature/humidity sensor to allow me to play with garage cooling options over the upcoming summer months.
Add a garage door closure sensor so the device can tell when the door is open or closed, so the app can provide open/closed status back to network clients.
Integrate my X10 Firecracker dongle, to allow me to control my existing X10 outlets/lights

The C++ requirement came partly from a desire to tackle a ‘real’ project with the language using modern language features like smart pointers, and to try out some of the Boost library’s programming constructs for asynchronous networking. I’ve also been playing around with building basic electronic circuits, and making some necessary hardware for the Pi seemed like a fun time.

The Hardware

It took a while to get the electronics working, and I learned a decent amount along the way (even though there really isn’t much to this). I started trying to trigger my 3.3v relays directly using the GPIO pins on the Pi, and when that didn’t work I had to go back and figure out that GPIO pins can’t drive the level of current required. I was also using a shift register initially to reduce the number of pins coming off of the Pi, but it ended up being unnecessary and was eventually removed.

Testing first iteration using shift registers

The second iteration two introduced some diodes and transistors, and then I was up and running. I added a couple momentary contact switches to provide local light and door control, and picked up some DHT11 to do my temperature/humidity sensing.

I put everything together on a breadboard, with a plan to solder everything together and put it into a clean enclosure with my couple of surface mounted switches, but I quickly fell in love with the idea of just putting an acrylic top over it, and mounting the Pi and breadboard together on another sheet of acrylic (spray painted black on the back), as-is. It has a fun look to it, and that might be what I like about the whole project most.

Second iteration of electronics using transistors, diodes, and opto-couplers

The one part that sadly hasn’t made the cut yet is the X10 firecracker. This is a control device I used to have connected to my PC (back when I had a serial port), which works in conjunction with a wireless receiver to send On/Off power commands to outlets and switches throughout my house. I found and installed an RS-232 shield on the Pi, but later found out that it doesn’t connect the RTS/CTS lines used to power and signal the Firecracker. Oh well, I’ll think of something in the future…

The Software

I chose CodeBlocks as my IDE of choice on the Pi, after seeing a few recommendations online for people coding in C++ on the Pi. I was able to target C++ 11 features, and although it took a while to figure out how to get the Boost libraries to link up to my project, the process wasn’t too bad. In general, however, I wouldn’t recommend that people try to write code directly on the Gen 1 Raspberry Pi, at least when you’re trying to do it using an IDE on top of x-windows. It’s really slow, not only when trying to compile (which takes a long time even for trivial programs), but even typing code into the editor is noticeably delayed. I eventually started writing and testing as much as I could in Visual Studio, and then bringing the code files over to the Pi for final testing and implementation. For final debugging/testing I eventually ended up editing files using VI over SSH to skip the UI overhead on the PI, and that seemed much more usable.

Running CodeBlocks on the Pi

I have the project checked into GitHub, and you can check it out here. With any luck I’ll actually come back and check in some schematics for the hardware portion of the application, but for now at least the software is up there in case the Pi dies in the extreme heat of my garage over the summer.

Trying it Out

I was pretty excited the first time I was able to trigger the door and light manually using the new Pi-based controller, and even more so when triggering it from my desk. The design has two LEDs, one that blinks on/off at roughly a one second interval, and one that lights red when the door is open.

Talking to the garage door using Putty

What’s Next?

In the next post, I’ll cover writing Windows Phone and hopefully a Microsoft Band apps to talk to our garage door.

Open Source release of C# Spyder control library

Key Features

Full implementation of the published Spyder UDP control protocol
System Config File parsing – provides full Spyder data object model to clients
Drawing Data (live view) data stream deserialization (Supports 2.10.8 – 4.0.4)
Spyder quick file transfer procotol (QFT) implementation. List, get, and set files
Thumbnail Manager – provides background downloading, multi-resolution scaling, and memory lifetime management of system thumbnail images

Consuming the Nuget Package (.Net Developers)

The Nuget package is the easiest way for .Net developers to consume the Spyder client library, and can be used to target Windows Phone 8.1 or later, Windows RT / Store apps, or .Net 4.5 or later desktop applications. Get it from Visual Studio using the Nuget package manager (see screenshot below).

Nuget Package Info Page: https://www.nuget.org/packages/SpyderClientLibrary/

Getting the Source

GitHub Project Link: https://github.com/dsmithson/SpyderClientLibrary

If you want to build the library yourself, peruse the source, or even port it to another platform, head over to GitHub to get access to the source code (link above). This source uses the Apache 2.0 license, so you can do whatever you want with it. Please do use the issue tracker or submit pull requests if you have anything you’d like to add or fix, and have fun!

What’s Next?

In future posts, we’ll explore some sample applications that use the library to do common things like control command keys, perform file backup/restore, and possibly even create a display simulator control that works from the Spyder server’s real-time data stream. I’ll also be working on some general documentation that I’ll post on the GitHub site, so keep an eye on the project’s GitHub page.

Spyder Client Command Key Visualization