The Arduino version of the door controller has been running for a couple of years now. Problems have occasionally cropped up, usually a hardware issue, such as a relay board, motor or (gasp) the Arduino itself. Yes we burned out a board once.
To address the hardware issues we had to scrutinize the entire setup and found that we needed to have three separate power supplies - one for the Arduino, one to drive the relay board, and one to supply voltage to the motor. The Arduino and relay were originally sharing a power supply, and this may have overdriven something on the Arduino board.
Once we separated these we ran successfully for months until the motor burned out. Possible causes include failure of the software to stop the motor once it arrived at the UP or DOWN position, causing a stall condition. Or perhaps some electrical surge when the relay contacts opened and closed. Or, too much chicken dust.....enclosing the electronics in a project box helped but did not entirely eliminate dust buildup.
We are experimenting now with a motor driver board to replace the motor relay. Stay tuned for results.
We are also in the process of migrating from Arduino to Raspberry Pi. This is not as straightforward as it may seem, since the Arduino libraries "hide" a lot of low level operations. Nevertheless, we are making progress. So far we have added a Real Time Clock (RTC) and Temperature sensor. The former uses the I2C bus, while the latter utilizes a 1-wire interface.
We have learned how to control the Pi's GPIO pins using the WiringPi library and are now evaluating the libgpio-dev library. The wiringPi library is more user-friendly, especially for folks accustomed to coding on Arduino.
Advantages of a Pi (in our case a Pi Zero W 2):
-smaller form factor
-built-in WiFi
-can log in remotely to monitor and update software
-can use a ribbon cable to connect GPIO pins to a custom auxiliary board
-Can multitask
-Less expensive