The Alliance Manufacturing Co. began selling garage door openers in 1954. Since then, its products’ basic design—a radio-controlled motor powering rods that pull a door up to open it and push it down to close it—has not changed. There have been some design embellishments in the intervening decades, such as the addition of motion sensors that stop the door’s motion if an object is in the way, and the use of keypads to enable entry via a PIN. The Overhead Door Corp. purchased the firm, now called The Genie Co., in 1994, but the products remain essentially the same. They’re also still manufactured in the United States, in Mount Hope, Ohio.
Last summer, The Genie Co. began selling Aladdin Connect, a retrofitting kit that connects the Genie garage door opener to the Internet of Things via a homeowner’s Wi-Fi network. Now, after collecting feedback from consumers, the company is preparing to launch new services to grow Aladdin Connect’s capabilities, explains Steve Janas, The Genie Co.’s VP and general manager for sales and marketing.
Aladdin Connect has two functions: enabling a smartphone to open or close a garage door when a person is home, and sending alerts to that phone regarding the door’s status when he or she is away. Why? Janas says security is one part of the value proposition.
Janas says that if he is out of town and receives an alert on his phone that his garage door has been opened at a time when no one should be home, there is not much he can do, aside from call family members. That’s why Genie is working to integrate Aladdin Connect with Internet-linked home security systems, in addition to possibly integrating home security camera feeds into the Aladdin app, so that if a homeowner receives an alert that the door has opened, he or she can then tap into the camera feed to see who is there.
Customers report using Aladdin Connect to provide remote access as well, Janas says. “If you live in Chicago but are in Florida,” he explains, “and your wife calls and says she can’t get into the house because she doesn’t have her keys, you can open the garage door.”
Sometimes, Janas says, homeowners want to be able to schedule the door to open at regular intervals. “You might need UPS to drop off a package at the same time each week, but don’t want to give the driver a code to enter the garage,” he states. “We’re working to upgrade the app to include timed events, so that, say, every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 10 am, the garage door would open for 10 minutes and then close. Originally, we didn’t think that would be appealing, but consumers are asking for something like this.” Genie plans to push out the feature as an app later this year, Janas adds.
To develop Aladdin Connect, Genie worked with Exosite, which provides cloud services to enable IoT applications. Exosite supplies the enrollment and account-management services that power the Aladdin Connect app. The firm recently launched a new suite of offerings called Exosite Business Transformation Services, intended to help organizations design and market IoT-enabled products. Through its partner network, the company also recently introduced ExositeReady, a certified hardware program that includes a development board with an integrated Wi-Fi module and microcontroller, as well as the ExositeReady software development kit, designed to help users quickly and easily connect an IoT-enabled product to Exosite’s cloud-based platform.
The Aladdin Connect retrofitting kit includes two pieces of hardware: a door-position sensor and a door-control module. The positioning sensor, mounted onto a garage door, is powered by a coin cell battery that lasts for roughly one year, and communicates with the control module via a Bluetooth connection—sending it either an “open” or “closed” message, based on the door’s status. The control module communicates with the home’s Wi-Fi network. (This assumes the home’s Wi-Fi signal is adequately strong in the garage. If not, the router must be moved closer to the garage or an extender added to the network.)
“You attach the door control module to the door opener by screwing in two wires to the available ports on the [ceiling-mounted] door opener” or to the existing wall-mounted door opener, Janas explains. (In either case, he says, the control module needs to be plugged into a standard wall outlet as well.) In addition to Genie door openers, the Aladdin Connect is compatible with most other brands of garage door openers on the market, Janas says. (A full list is available here.)
The Aladdin Connect app is available on both the iOS and Android platforms. Lowe’s and Home Depot sell the Aladdin Connect retrofitting kit for around $100.