Once upon a time a doorbell was little more than a button, a transformer, and a bell tucked somewhere around the house. These days, they get a little bit fancier. [Philipp Schweizer] has recently been exploring how to turn existing dumb doorbells into smarter ones.
The build is based around a wired doorbell setup, in particular, a Vistadoor ADV-100. [Philipp] was able to find a simple place to tap in to a signal that went to 5 V when the doorbell was rung. He wanted to hook this into his smart home system as easily as possible. Thus, he grabbed a rather unique part—the ESP32-H2. This is notable in the ESP32 family for having no WiFi connectivity. What it does have, however, is an 802.15.4 radio good for Thread and Zigbee communications.
[Phillip] explains that hooking the ESP32-H2 up to fire a notification to Home Assistant every time the doorbell goes off is easy—and it doesn’t mess with the standard doorbell’s chiming behavior one bit. He also explains how to set up neat automations, such as having a separate smart camera capture an image when the door bell is fired.
If you’re looking to integrate an existing doorbell into your Home Assistant setup, this project could be just what you need. We’ve featured some other neat doorbell builds too, like this touchless design from the dark days of the coronavirus pandemic.
I just did this same kind of project this weekend. not especially by choice, we had one of those wireless doorbells where you plug a little box into a wall outlet and the button part just has a battery and it stopped working. s.o was about to trash it and order another but i said “let me try something first”
a little rtlsdr + claude later and I added support for it to an existing esp dev board with an extra radio chip breakout (not the h one) and esphome.
now when you push my doorbell my normal audio/music speaker in my house plays a noise and says “ding dong monster trucker” (there a little ones around who love monster trucks)
i already had the esp setup to control some ceiling fans that all come with those terrible remote controls, so like total active effort was
maybe an 30min across a couple of hours of claude figuring it all out. (i was mostly required to physically press the actual button)
claude is really a major gamechanger for HA projects.
need to get a wifi camera next to go full private ring camera style like this.
haha your custom doorbell tone reminds me of a stupid hack i did a few months ago. i have a voip phone for the kids, one of the grandstream boxes tied to a regular POTS phone, and the ringer in the phone died somehow. and i made a daemon that queries the voip adaptor every second to ask if it’s ringing (it has a telnet console with a status command), and it plays an mp3. didn’t want the hassle of picking from existing ringtones so i sang a 30 second song and overlaid it with beating on an aluminum lid from the kitchen. unlike yours, my kids hate it :)
Nice hack! You should write it up and submit it to hackaday. That sounds like a very interesting system. I’d love to hear the ringtone.
In 2022, I got news from my condo that we were getting our intercom renewed after 20 years. I got excited, thinking we were getting one with phone notifications and cameras, but it was the exact same old model, just brand new out of the box. Then, after the job was done, I opened the controller inside my unit and installed a Shelly 2. Now, at least I can get notifications when someone rings and open the main door remotely.
That is actually the version to be excited about. Any smart device would be tying your condo to some cloud prison. You (and me, did the same) got the best option.
Always FUn to DIY and flash microcontrollers, but for $8 I simply used a ‘zg-002 rf” / “zigbee smart relay”, it can be powered by DC or AC. I power it from the same DC that rings the chime. When the doorbell rings, HA knows, and I even wired it up in a way that I can ring the chime from HA!
Nice idea!
Once upon a time a doorbell was little more than a handle, a cable, and a bell on a spring.
Can’t charge subscription for it, it’s gotta go.
And a little before that, the doorbell was a hand repeatedly beat against the door. =)
You can use other body parts too ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
I think all the ideas are pretty similar.
I found this project in 2019 and I didn’t have a doorbell at all.
https://frenck.dev/diy-smart-doorbell-for-just-2-dollar/
Back then I just got rid of my Ring doorbell because of one of the scandals surrounding the company and I needed something else. This was the first ESP project I did. It’s still working. It’s fantastic.