Greg LeFevre Gate Phone Control

What It Does

• Two Apple Shortcuts pinned to the client's iPhone home screen, Open Gate and Close Gate. No new app to learn.
• Each tap closes a relay contact for half a second, which is electrically identical to pressing the Guard Station pushbutton the Viking board already expects.
• Works from anywhere. The Shortcut tries the relay's local IP first and falls back to Shelly Cloud, which is free and has no subscription.
• Nothing about existing gate operation changes. The RF remote, the free-exit loop, the photo beams and edge sensors all continue to work exactly as they do now, and none of them route through any of this.
• The RF clicker remains primary. The phone is convenience. An internet outage means "use the clicker", not "locked out".
• No position feedback in this design. The Reolink camera at the gate is the position feedback.

Bill of Materials

Digital Bay Tech, only US source, not on Amazon

Amazon

Home Depot / local

Already on hand or already ordered, do not rebuy

Total: about $240, or about $260 with the sun shield.

Wiring

Terminal-by-terminal

Build Steps

1. Paint the enclosure. Scuff 220-320 grit, degrease with isopropyl, shoot Krylon Fusion gloss black, mask the gasket, sealing lip, latches and hinge pins, cure fully before any electronics go in. Painting is the UV fix for ABS, not a cosmetic step, because UV degradation is a surface effect.
2. Mount the DIN rail and the Flex-Utility to the QILIPSU's included mounting plate. Flex-Utility flat on the left roughly two thirds; DIN rail on the remaining width with clear rail left spare; surge protector near the uplink cable entry, close to the ground point.
3. Drill and fit the enclosure entries. Uplink Cat6 and camera Cat6 each take a PG9 gland. The 18/4 run to the Viking cabinet and the 120VAC supply each take a liquidtight connector, not a gland. Ground conductor takes a gland or a lug through a drilled hole, installer's call. Breather vent at the lowest point.
4. Mount the enclosure to the post using the included wall brackets. Drip loop on every cable entering from above.
5. Run and terminate the conduit between the enclosures. A 1/2 in liquidtight connector threads into either a spare Viking knockout or a drilled 7/8 in hole with a locknut, so a missing knockout only means a step bit is needed.
6. Land the 120VAC with WAGO lever nuts, feeding both the 60W adapter and the Shelly's L and N.
7. Land the dry contacts at the Viking end, two conductors on Open and GND, two on Close and GND. Nothing else in the Viking cabinet changes.
8. Patch the Shelly to a spare USW-Flex port.
9. Ground rod and bonding.

Configuration

Shelly

• Give it a DHCP reservation on the UDR7 so the LAN address is stable. The LAN-first Shortcut depends on it.
• Both channels: enable auto_off with auto_off_delay of 0.5 seconds. This is Shelly's own published value for garage and gate pulse simulation. The setting lives on the device, not in a cloud scene, so it stays correct if a call is duplicated or arrives late.
• Both channels default OFF.
• Enable Shelly Cloud.
• Check whether local RPC authentication is enabled. If it is, the LAN Shortcut needs a Basic Auth header. Confirm on site.
• One Shelly Cloud account per client site, Timber SAV holds the login. The Shelly Cloud auth key is ACCOUNT-LEVEL, not per-device, so a leaked key reaches every Shelly on that account. Never share one account across client sites.

The two calls

Local, plain GET, no body. Use id=1 for the Close channel.

http://<gate-shelly-ip>/rpc/Switch.Set?id=0&on=true&toggle_after=1

Cloud, POST with header Content-Type: application/json.

https://<server-shard>/v2/devices/api/set/switch?auth_key=<AUTH_KEY>

{"id":"<device-id>","channel":0,"on":true,"toggle_after":1}

The auth key AND the regional server shard both come from the Shelly app under User Settings, Authorization cloud key, shown on the same screen. The device ID comes from Device, Settings, Device Information.

Apple Shortcuts

Two shortcuts, "Open Gate" and "Close Gate", each pinned to the home screen. Each one: Get Contents of URL against the LAN address first, and on failure fall back to the cloud POST, then show a notification reporting the result.

The notification matters: a fire-and-forget Shortcut that silently fails is the worst outcome for a non-technical client, because his phone has signal and everything else works, so a failure looks like the install broke.

Network

Gate post on its own VLAN. Out to internet allowed. No path to the house LAN in either direction. Verify WPA2/AES is actually enabled on the Loco5AC link at commissioning rather than assuming it; airMAX point-to-point gear commonly ships with encryption off.

Commissioning & Handover

Verify on site

• UL 325. Actuation from out of line of sight is explicitly permitted provided two independent entrapment-protection means are present and functional and every trigger still runs the board's own timing and reversal logic. Wiring across Open/GND and Close/GND is electrically identical to the pushbutton the board expects, so it defeats nothing. What must be verified is that the existing photo beams and edge sensors are landed on the board's MONITORED entrapment inputs, not merely present. That is the single fact that decides compliance and it is a gate-technician check.
• Confirm a momentary Open while the gate is already open does nothing harmful, and that the board's auto-close Timer does not fight a remote Close.
• Confirm WPA2/AES on the radio link.
• Confirm the relay fails open-circuit so loss of power, Ethernet or cloud simply reverts the gate to the RF remote and loops with no stuck input.

Client handover sheet

Thermal note

The Shelly's +40C ceiling is the binding spec in that enclosure; the USW-Flex is good to 55C and its adapter to 60C. A sealed black box in direct sun runs 15 to 30C above ambient, so if the post catches afternoon sun, fit the sun shield: an aluminum plate standing off the top and sun-facing side by about an inch, painted black to match. The air gap does the work. In winter the nested boxes trap the adapter's waste heat, which helps hold the Shelly above its -20C floor.

Decisions