door bell 1/4 mile away - part 2

More progress on my incremental work to improve my front gate of the ranch for expected and unexpected visitors. Since I installed the PoE remote door bell camera I am satisfied with its design and functional reliability given the challenges of being 1/4 mile from the house. I want to be able to operate the front gate from the house. I also want to keep the cost as well as power consumption down. The latter is most important as everything there relies on solar energy.
 

motion triggered capture of the door bell camera

I searched high and low for a PoE GPIO module. There are very few out there and none has good cloud hosting support. I concluded I have to go with one that is wifi and I found this wifi module made by Shelly that can do the job. Before committing to the installation I put it through my bench test to prove its functional reliability, as well as power consumption.

The down side with a wifi based one is I would need to add a wifi access point which means addition load on the solar base power system that is already taxed during the winter months.

my bench test setup for the Shelly Plus 1

enrolling the module into the cloud service with the iPhone app

After enrolling the module into the cloud service it worked a bit but then crapped out most of the time. It would turned out it took about half a day for the enrollment and cloud supported operation to stabilize. I programmed it to emulate a off-on-off pulsing sequence to operate the gate opener.

this module would be mounted inside the opener controller housing

I wired up this LED light bulb as a test load

As the wifi module needs to operate in low ambient outdoors I decided to conduct a low temperature test and also make sure it does not draw excessive current. I put it in a plastic bag and let it soak in the freezer.

it works after left in freezer for a few hours

As for the wifi signal, I bought this what was represented as a PoE AP, but turned out not to be the case. Instead of returning it I opted to install it in the garage and purchase another low cost PoE AP.

the AP that was represented as PoE but turned out to be not

I found this cheap PoE AP on Amazon; it supports only 2.4G Hz wifi which is all I need; it would be nice to have wifi service at the front gate for trouble shooting and routine maintenance

Now is just a waiting game for the AP to arrive so I can install all these and test them in-situ.