Shortcut to Smart Living: Auto-Opening Garage in Finland

The Problem

After moving into my new apartment, I ran into a small but annoying problem: the garage door could only be opened by phone call. Every time I came home, I had to park the car, take out my phone, and call the door system. Not dial a friend. Call a door.

In Finland, garage doors are usually kept closed for safety and privacy reasons. There are a few common ways to open them: a key fob, a car-based trigger, or the odd phone-call system I ended up with. You call a number, the system checks who you are, and then the door opens. Simple in principle. Annoying in daily practice.

Car-plate recognition is surprisingly rare here. Maybe snow makes it less practical in winter. Maybe privacy matters more. Either way, the phone-call setup was annoying enough that I wanted to automate it.

Why Geofencing Alone Doesn't Work

As an iPhone user, Shortcuts was the first tool that came to mind. It supports geofencing, which meant I could trigger an action when my phone entered a certain area.

My first idea was simple: when the car got close to the garage, the phone would automatically dial the number and open the door.

It sounded clean in my head. In practice, it was messy.

Geofencing accuracy isn’t perfect. To make sure it triggers, I drew a larger circle. However, this caused a new problem: if I walked past the garage or took a bus, the phone would also trigger the call, which clearly wouldn’t work.

Then I noticed another clue: when I get in the car, the phone connects to the car’s Bluetooth. If I could use that as a signal, I could avoid some false triggers.

Unfortunately, iPhone does not give you direct access to the connected Bluetooth list, at least not in the way I wanted. That idea died there, so I had to find another route.

The Workaround: Bluetooth + File Status

After a few false starts, I settled on a small workaround: use a file to record whether I was "in the car" or "out of the car" instead of relying on Bluetooth directly.

• When entering the car: The phone connects to the car's Bluetooth and writes an "in-car" status to a file.
• When exiting the car: When the Bluetooth disconnects, the phone updates the file to an "out-of-car" status.

With this status check, the geofence trigger would only dial the number when the phone detects the "in-car" status. Even if I walk past the garage, it won't trigger by mistake.

It was a slightly awkward detour, but it worked.

Four Steps to Automate Garage Door Opening

To make the whole thing usable, I built it as a four-step automation in Shortcuts. If you only care about the idea, skip the details below. If you want to recreate it, the steps are all here.

1. Mark “In-Car” Status

First, we need the system to know when you’re in the car. This is done using Shortcuts’ automation feature. When the phone connects to the car’s Bluetooth, it triggers an action to create a PDF file marking the “in-car” status.

Shortcut Settings:

1. Open Shortcuts and create a new Automation.
2. Select Bluetooth as the trigger and specify your car’s Bluetooth device.
3. Add actions:
   • Make PDF from Current Date: Create a PDF containing the current timestamp.
   • Save PDF to Shortcuts: Save the PDF to a specific path, e.g., onthecar.pdf, and enable “Overwrite If File Exists.”

This means that whenever the phone connects to the car’s Bluetooth, it writes a timestamp to the PDF and marks the status as “in-car.”

2. Clear Status When Exiting

Next, we need to clear the status when the phone disconnects from the car’s Bluetooth, marking the “out-of-car” status. This is done by overwriting the onthecar.pdf file with an empty value.

Shortcut Settings:

1. Create a new automation triggered by Bluetooth Disconnected, and specify your car’s Bluetooth device.
2. Add actions:
   • Text: Set the content to “0.”
   • Make PDF from Text: Convert “0” into a PDF file.
   • Save PDF to Shortcuts: Save to the same path (onthecar.pdf) and enable “Overwrite If File Exists.”

This means that whenever the phone disconnects from the car’s Bluetooth, the PDF is overwritten with a simple value and the status becomes “out of car.”

3. Set a Geofence

Next, we use geofencing to detect when the car approaches the garage. This can be easily set up using Shortcuts’ location-based triggers.

Shortcut Settings:

1. Create a new automation triggered by Arrive at Location, and set the location to your garage address.
2. Add a Run Shortcut action, selecting the Shortcut for opening the garage (described in the next step).

The geofence needs to be large enough to trigger reliably, but not so large that it fires when I am just walking nearby.

4. Geofence Trigger Logic

Finally, when the geofence is triggered, we use a Shortcut to determine whether to call and open the garage door based on the PDF file’s content.

Shortcut Settings:

1. Add the following actions:
   • Get Text from PDF: Read the content of the onthecar.pdf file.
   • Count Characters in Text: Count the number of characters in the PDF to determine the status.
   • If Condition: Add logic:
     • If the character count is greater than 8 (indicating a timestamp, i.e., “in-car” status), proceed to the next step.
     • If the character count is less than 8 (indicating “0,” i.e., “out-of-car” status), skip the action.
   • Call: Make the phone call to the garage door system (ensure the number is saved in your contacts).

That way, the geofence only triggers the call if the phone is actually in the car.

Final Result

With this setup, the workflow became much less annoying:

1. When I get in the car, the phone automatically marks the “in-car” status.
2. When I leave the car, the status is cleared to prevent false triggers.
3. As the car approaches the garage, the system checks the status and automatically dials to open the door.

Your browser does not support the video tag.

Take a look at the final result

With this Shortcuts setup, I got rid of one tiny recurring annoyance in daily life. That is usually what I like about automation: not the grand idea of making life “smart,” but the smaller feeling of removing one thing you have to think about every day.