Greg LeFevre Gate Phone Control

What It Does

• One Apple Shortcut pinned to the client's iPhone home screen, Open Gate. No new app to learn.
• A tap closes a relay contact for half a second, which is electrically identical to pressing the Guard Station pushbutton the Viking board already expects.
• The gate closes itself. The Viking board's own auto-close Timer is set to about 15 seconds, so there is no Close button and nothing for the client to forget.
• 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

Shelly’s US store, in stock

Confirmed in stock as of 24 Aug 2026. Free shipping over $50, ships from the US.

Amazon

Home Depot / local

Already on hand or already ordered DO NOT REBUY

Tools, confirm you own these

• Step bit or unibit up to about 1-3/8 in. Covers the PG9 holes, the M12 breather and the 7/8 in liquidtight holes in one tool.
• Drill/driver
• Caulk gun
• Digital multimeter, for the commissioning continuity checks

Grand total: about $327. About $177 is confirmed against live listings, the relay price now included, and the remaining $150 is commodity-hardware estimate.

Every line marked "est" needs a checkout-page confirm before the order goes in, because Amazon blocked automated price extraction.

Confirm on arrival

Wiring

Enclosure fit, confirmed

From QILIPSU's dimension drawing, tolerance ±2 mm.

The verdict is that it fits, and the 28 mm margin is the tightest number in the build. The surge protector at 91 x 61 mm stacks below the Shelly in the same strip; together they use roughly 80 mm of the 271 mm of available rail height. The Pro 1 footprint is confirmed from Shelly's own published specification at 94 x 19 x 69 mm ±0.5, identical to the two-channel Pro 2, so this margin holds as drawn.

Depth is a non-issue. The Shelly stands about 80 mm off the plate once you count the DIN rail and the 4 mm plate, against 166 mm of internal depth.

The perforated grid area is inset from the plate edges, so plan the Flex-Utility toward one end and expect to drill the solid plate margin for the DIN rail rather than assuming grid holes reach everywhere.

These dimensions are published only as an image inside the Amazon listing's photo carousel, never in text anywhere, which is why they took a manual look to obtain.

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. The sanding pad, isopropyl alcohol and painter's tape are now on the Bill of Materials, not assumed shop stock.
2. Mount the DIN rail and the Flex-Utility to the QILIPSU's included mounting plate, confirmed to be a perforated grid plate with through-bolting holes available across the grid area. Flex-Utility toward one end; DIN rail in the 122 mm strip beside it; surge protector below the Shelly, near the uplink cable entry and the ground point. The grid is inset from the plate edges, so expect to drill the solid plate margin for the DIN rail rather than assuming grid holes reach everywhere. The Flex-Utility's own hardware, 4 drywall anchors plus 2 security screws, is wall hardware and wrong for a backplate; use machine screws and nylock nuts instead. The same fastener class covers the DIN rail and the UACC-ETH-SP-Pro, which mounts on 38mm hole spacing, M3/M5, screws not included.
3. Drill and fit the enclosure entries. Uplink Cat6 and camera Cat6 each take a PG9 gland. The 18/2 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: drill 12 mm, not 1/2 in. A 1/2 in bit cuts 12.7 mm, slightly oversize for M12; the O-ring and flange will usually still seal it, but 12 mm is correct. Mount it at the lowest point, facing down or shielded from direct rain impingement. It equalizes pressure so the enclosure does not pump moisture past the gasket on every temperature swing, and it is not meant to take running water head-on.
4. Mount the enclosure to the fence using the included wall brackets, lagged into a structural member, a post or a rail, not just the fence boards. A loaded enclosure hanging off pickets will work itself loose. 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 contact at the Viking end, two conductors: one on Open, one on GND. The Close terminal is left unused; the Viking board's own 15 second Timer closes the gate on its own. 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.
• 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.
• 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 call

Local, plain GET, no body.

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 Shortcut

One shortcut, "Open Gate", pinned to the home screen. 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 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 confirm the board's 15 second auto-close Timer actually closes the gate on every cycle without a stall.
• 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 still the tightest spec in that enclosure, against the USW-Flex at 55C and its adapter at 60C. The enclosure mounts on a northeast-facing wood fence, so it takes only weak morning sun when ambient is coolest and sits in shade through the 2 to 5pm peak, the window that would otherwise have threatened the Shelly's ceiling. No shade structure is required. In winter the nested boxes trap the adapter's waste heat, which helps hold the Shelly above its -20C floor.

Decisions