Well, this project has been installed for several months now and I wanted to give an update. It's been an overwhelming success, but I have had couple issues and some lessons learned along the way, so here they are:

One of my original requirements was to not rely on an active Internet connection at my house in order to be able to open the driveway gate and garage door. This ruled out all of the "cloud" IoT services out there, and there are many. This is why I have my beloved PogoPlug.

Well, if you look at my code that I posted, I didn't follow that same requirement when I wrote the JavaScript. I found out the hard way (after a rather nasty thunderstorm) that I was way off target on that requirement.

Because my cable company can't keep my Internet working 24/7, the whole solution took a dirt nap during and after that thunderstorm even though my power, WiFi, Nodes, and PogoPlug were working just fine. I went into troubleshooting mode.

I figured out that because I was loading up the jQuery and the Paho MQTT libraries from an URL on the Internet, the solution simply won't work without an Internet connection. Thankfully, this was easy enough to fix. After a slightly painful facepalm, I just downloaded the libraries to a directory reachable by the webserver on the PogoPlug, changed the path in the JavaScript code and it's fixed.

The second thing that took down the project when the Internet failed was DNS resolution. Again, by a fault/laziness in my JavaScript, I was connecting to the MQTT server using the DNS name of my Internet connection (brought to me by DuckDNS [awesome]). The cool thing with that is that my router is smart enough to do a hairpin NAT if I make the request from inside my network as well. So, whether I am connected on my home WiFi or on my SmartPhone on LTE, I can reach my solution through this DNS name.

Here's the problem. If the Internet is down, 1) I can't reach the solution from the Internet (of course), and 2) I can reach the solution from my local WiFi, but the MQTT connection fails due to the dependency on DNS which is hosted on the Internet. To some JavaScript programmers, you're probably laughing right now and you probably saw this coming. Being that I learned JavaScript just for this project, I think I did pretty well (thank you very much).

The solution, as it turns out, is a simple tweak to the code that takes advantage of the fact that the web server and the MQTT server are both running on the same host. I simply use the hostname portion of the document URL as the hostname for the MQTT connection. Thus, when accessing from the Internet with a DNS name, the MQTT connection uses the DNS name. When accessing from local WiFi with a DNS name, the router can resolve the DNS, hairpin NAT me and I'm good. And, finally, when accessing from local WiFi with a simple IP address (let's call it emergency mode because it's a different URL from normal), the MQTT connection uses the local IP address to connect to MQTT. PERFECT!!

So, I'm a little embarrassed about some of the issues I had. I should have seen those coming and fixed them the first go around. It was maybe a little sloppy of me, but I feel pretty good about this project overall because it's really been super reliable and everyone in the house is using it now.

My next step is to try to build an app rather than rely on a webpage because there are some complexities with the way smartphones interact with their browsers that kind of suck. Like, what happens if you bring up the web page on the WiFi to open the driveway gate and then as you leave in the car, the phone roams over to LTE before you close the driveway gate? This happens a lot with certain uncoachable people in my household. The answer is that you have to reload the page manually (on iOS, on Android the page refreshes automatically about 50% of the time...arrrgh!!). The bottom line is that I don't have total and full control of the MQTT session in JavaScript and I think I can address these things with the control that an app gives me. The first target is Android (which is what I carry), but I want to do an iOS app as well for the wife and kids. That's a whole new project though.