My garage door is a Centurion – an Australian brand with its own smartphone app and a local API baked into the door’s controller. I run Homebridge for everything else in the house (it’s the open-source bridge that exposes non-HomeKit smart devices to Apple’s Home app), so getting the door to show up there properly, camera and all, turned into its own small project.

The starting point

There was already a plugin for this: KieraDOG/homebridge-cgd-garage-door, built by Long Zhao. It talked to the door’s local API, exposed open/close, the lock mode, and the courtesy light as a Homebridge platform, and worked. But it hadn’t been touched in a while, it predated Homebridge 2.0 and modern Node, and as an outside contributor I have no publish access to push new versions of the original npm package. Rather than run a stale plugin forever or start from nothing, I forked it.

Catching up, then diverging

The fork started boring on purpose: merge in everything from upstream main first, so the history stays honest about what’s actually new. From there the first real change was Homebridge 2.0 and Node 20+ support – table stakes for a plugin to keep working on a current Homebridge install.

The bigger step was migrating the whole plugin to the modern ESM format Homebridge’s own plugin template now expects: "type": "module" in package.json, TypeScript’s nodenext module resolution, export default instead of the old CommonJS export =, explicit .js extensions on every relative import (Node’s ESM resolver requires it, TypeScript won’t add it for you), and a modernized config.schema.json. Alongside that I brought in a proper local dev loop from the official plugin template – npm run watch now builds, links, and runs a real Homebridge instance against a throwaway test config, rebuilding on every save, instead of hand-wiring npm link each time.

That migration also forced the publishing question: the original homebridge-cgd-garage-door package name isn’t mine to publish to. It went out first under a scoped name, then got renamed again to @snapeos/homebridge-centurion-garage-door – “Centurion” is the brand actually printed on the hardware, and a much more findable search term than “CGD” (the app’s internal abbreviation). The Homebridge platform identifier itself (CGDGarageDoor, what goes in a user’s config.json) stayed untouched throughout, so nobody’s existing config broke across any of this.

What got added on top

Once the plugin was back on solid, current footing, a handful of real gaps were worth closing:

  • A Stop button. The door’s local API has always supported door=stop, but nothing used it. HomeKit’s garage door service only models open/closed, so there’s no native slot for “stop” – it’s exposed as a separate momentary switch instead, the same workaround other garage plugins use for the same HomeKit limitation.
  • Real device identity and error state. The accessory’s serial number was a random HAP placeholder; it’s now the device’s stable hostname. More usefully, the door’s status API quietly reports its own error codes, which were being ignored entirely – a genuine device-side fault now surfaces properly as “Not Responding” in the Home app instead of looking like a normal, healthy door.
  • Native camera streaming. The Centurion controller has a built-in camera, served as an unauthenticated MJPEG stream on port 88. Previously that meant running a separate homebridge-camera-ffmpeg setup alongside this plugin just for the picture. It’s now a first-class CameraController on the garage door accessory itself – live view and snapshots, right there in Home, no second plugin. Getting ffmpeg to actually forward frames from a real MJPEG source (not a synthetic test pattern) surfaced two genuine bugs worth remembering: the stream has no reliable timestamps, so forcing an output framerate silently dropped every frame until -use_wallclock_as_timestamps was added on the input side; and libx264’s default lookahead buffering meant nothing reached the output at all on a short-lived session, fixed with -preset ultrafast -tune zerolatency.
  • A stuck update lock. A command that threw partway through left the plugin’s internal “is updating” flag permanently set, silently freezing status polling after a single failure – an easy one to miss until it happens to you at an inconvenient moment.

Working with Claude Code on it

Most of this – the ESM migration, the camera integration, the bug fixes – was built working with Claude Code, in the same spirit as the 6AS Word Games project but for a very different kind of codebase: TypeScript, a real device protocol, and no way to “just reload the page” to check your work. The verification bar ended up higher than usual as a result – confirming the camera fix meant standing up a fake MJPEG server matching the real device’s exact response headers and capturing live RTP packets off a loopback SRTP receiver, not just watching tsc pass.

Try it

If you’ve got a Centurion door and run Homebridge, search “Centurion Garage Door” in the Homebridge UI, or:

npm install -g @snapeos/homebridge-centurion-garage-door

Repo’s at andrew-snape/homebridge-cgd-garage-door, full credit to Long Zhao’s original plugin for doing the hard part first – reverse-engineering the door’s local API in the first place.

Andrew