i would have just used the home assistant integration for blink and then had HA play the sounds.
Thankfully, it takes still zero cloud services to make my breakfast, ride my bike, and open my door.
And you can bet on that I’ll keep it that way.
I have a wireless doorbell with a speaker that plugs in to an outlet.
I’d much like to replace it with a zigbee-button, but I’ve had issues finding a foolproof (wife-approved) zigbee thing to make the ding-dong-noise.
Apologies if someone is offended by the following. It’s not meant as an offense, but a professional opinion about design and Implementation.
This is a really good example of absolutely not keeping it simple and utilizing so many dependencies you’d need to monitor to be sure your solution works that the overall design is just plain bad.
If you ever implement something and get caught in so many things, take a step back and think about how your goal could be achieved in a much simpler way or even if your requirements are that important in the first place.
Anyhow. 5c from a tech guy.
Yes. Sadly you often don’t get any choice. Especially if you are not an IT pro. The whole digital landscape for users is a disaster. With separate silos, incompatible formats, information loss and slow, manual effort with no overview. This is caused by big business land grabs and the total lack of information standards. A shameful state of IT to have in 2026.
Customers problem in a few years, not mine – is the mindset of these companies. They do it this way, because hooking up to cloud service X is cheaper to impement.
same reactions on hackernews
Or you could just get a dog and never miss someone at the door again.
This was great at first, but ten years in their hearing has gone. They’ll sleep through me yelling at the top of my lungs now.
My doorbell is a button that completes a circuit. Still works.
OP’s purpose was video security, not doorbells. People pushing the button instead of knocking was an unintentional consequence.
Your 70s doorbell is not helpful.
My doorbell is a sign that says “Knock”, because my 70’s doorbell is broken. It requires 0 cloud services to fix the problem of people pressing an unhelpful button.
Yes but I’m sure you need at least 5 different Volts for it to work.
Only 1. Standard 70s tech.
My doorbell is a raspberry pi that uses webhooks to send me messages on my privately hosted chat server and also rings a physical bell built in 1900. Do I win for the most simple high tech doorbell?
So you can ring your doorbell if you’re in vacation on the other side of the globe?
Yep, with curl because I have OliveTin setup to accept requests to ring the bell from other pis or myself if I feel the need via the web GUI.
But why?
Oh that’s a silly question. Why not?
The honest answer is in the US all doorbells are powered by simple 24VAC transformers that burn 6–7 watts just being powered up, forever, for decades. This annoyed me plus I wanted a fun bell so I wired up a pi to use a modern, efficient 24VDC power supy to ring the bell and it gets turned on by the pi only when its needed so now my idle wattage is more like 0.25W.
You know we can roll back the internet a bit… Let’s keep the speed and the unlimited traffic but drop the “always on” and give people “mobile internet hours” for their phone? :P
sure but how will we get our propaganda beamed to us 24/7?
You will have to get it in a digest and ration it throughout the day
In related topics, I’m still peeved that my freezer, unlike my camera, needs to do a full back-and-forth trip (in this case to Samsung’s SmartThings servers) just to notify my Home Assistant server that the door was left open.
Why would you even buy that? Nothing seems more dumb than a smart fridge.
Again, I was unaware my freezer even had online capabilities until after I had it installed at home and read the manual.
I didn’t see that part. But then you hooked it up anyways?
Yeah, thinking there would be a way to configure it for local networking (like I did with my cameras)
At least it CAN notify. I’ve got a zigbee door sensor glued to the side of the freezer and the door!
My fridge is tilted back a very small amount so the door closes on it’s own.
This is technology I can get behind. How many tokens does a closure take on average?
Can’t it just beep?
It does, and as a matter of fact I was unaware that it had automation support until after I read the manual. But I like to keep statistics on my devices, and I’m not exactly happy about losing them when Samsung or SmartThings decide to pull the plug. Hopefully I manage to patch some alternate firmware somehow by then.
No, it should definitely not need to talk to Samsung to share basic information with your homeassistant
I agree with that, it’s ridiculous that a known standard still depends on a centralized server
Have you captured the data with Wireshark to see if it’s readable? Could you have adguard/pihole/etc spoof the target DNS to a local server that then strips the data out of the packets and forwards them on to your homeassistant? Or have they garbled the information with some proprietary nonsense?
I have no idea of how to connect to my freezer directly to capture Wireshark packets, is there a tutorial for that?
If your freezer is on your local wifi and your computer is also on the local wifi you should be able to see all the packets it is transmitting over the wifi with Wireshark on your computer. If either your computer or freezer has a hard connection then you’ll need a little more trickery as switches/home routers minimise network congestion by directing traffic to specific MAC addresses as required.
Assuming you are all wifi, basically you load Wireshark (is free software, easily downloaded) and tell it to capture all packets from your wifi adaptor (there should be a handy option on the initial screen when you load the application). Once you start capturing you’ll be capturing everything on your wifi so it pays to be quick with what you want to achieve to minimise the data.
So, once you start capturing you open your fridge door a few times, leave it open till it beeps, maybe do that twice, then stop capturing. Following that you will just need to filter the capture by all packets from your fridges network IP or MAC (you should be able to find these from your home router). Once you have all the packets you should be able to click on them and expand all the details to see what data they are sending and where it’s being sent to. You should also see all the packets coming back from the vendor.
Just connect an ESP32 to the door switch and use that to notify your HA server.
I wonder how expensive would it be to import one of those. The system is also able to track and adjust temperature, so a simple ESP32 wouldn’t be enough to replace that circuitry
The ESP32 wouldn’t be able to adjust settings without a lot of hacking, but it wouldn’t be hard to add a temperature sensor so it could monitor that.
So instead of the video doorbell, use a simple camera. Then people knock on the door and you still have security footage without all the nonsense.
There are downsides to consider…
- Most people aren’t really phased by doorbell cameras…but everyone feels a security camera pointed at them
- The angle is generally worse for this purpose
- Unlike a doorbell, there is likely no existing data line or even power
- No way to sugarcoat it, security cameras kind of looks like shit. The best you can hope for is one that doesn’t stick out too bad
There’s options for decent-looking doorbell cameras without all the fuss. I use Amcrest, I know a lot of others use Reolink
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doorbell camera next to a security camera photograph.
The psychological effect of a security camera (do I really need to clarify bullet and dome cameras?) is different than a doorbell camera.
I was tempted to run PoE to the other side of the wall where my server is. A doorbell that could do it all locally on my server.
Then I thought “fuck it” and bolted an antique brass bell there instead. At least you know it’s working.
Reolink for the win in my opinion.
Of course a nice brass bell as indicated would work too.
Don’t they have relays for chimes?
Use the chime relay as a trigger for a real doorbell or ESP32 with a speaker.
Lot less dominos…
They don’t have a traditional doorbell which is why people previously knocked. Since they added the Blink doorbell, people ring the bell. Except there is no bell apart from the speaker built into the Blink… outside the front door… where it can’t be heard by people inside. So you can’t know if someone has rung the bell without having a phone on you to receive the notification. Blink sells a chime that can just be plugged into an outlet. Doesn’t have the best reviews but I would’ve given that a shot first. Maybe it isn’t sold in their market or something.
Ahh. From what I saw online, some have 2 screws above the battery compartment that sound like a NO relay to trigger existing systems if the user had them. I suppose it could be a different model.
I’m not too familiar with Blink products, just that a wall wart bell showed up in a quick search, so it is possible. Most camera doorbells I’ve seen that do have a pair of terminals, they’re to do as you described: connect to the bell circuit to get power and ring the existing bell. I’m doing a bit of inferring, since knocking sounded like the only previous option, that there’s no wire at their door to utilize. Couple that with their being in an apartment and it is likely the only way they’re getting one there is to surface run it. Or run behind any crown molding/baseboard trim they have, but that’s a labor-intensive pain in the ass.
