It takes 5 cloud services to hear my doorbell(blog.vghaisas.com)
3 pointsby vghaisas2 hours ago2 comments
  • vghaisas2 hours ago
    I thought it was finally time to write up the story of my absurd home doorbell implementation, especially because the upcoming Samsung SmartThings API pricing means things will have to change soon.

    Suggestions welcome!

    • embedding-shape2 hours ago
      I too have a IOT doorbell! It's using Zigbee, just like the actual speaker ("bell") that also serves as our home security audible alarm, and other things. It's basically "Button on the outside of house > Home Assistant > Speaker", and works 100% offline, and is backed by a UPS :)

      If you get rid of HTTP and 3rd party services, all this stuff gets really simple, durable and easy to maintain. Haven't touched the setup in years, except to change the battery once in the bell as it's 100% remote, haven't had a single issue since we set it up.

      • vghaisas2 hours ago
        Yeah, a local solution is probably the way to go. This was at the beginning of my home automation journey so I didn't have Home Assistant and Zigbee set up yet.

        But even if I replace the actual doorbell with a zigbee button, I still need a solution for the camera portion too.

        • embedding-shape2 hours ago
          > But even if I replace the actual doorbell with a zigbee button, I still need a solution for the camera portion too.

          True. My cameras (none outdoors though) are WiFi connected, and run tiny little individual UPSes too, saves recording locally to SD card and to a NAS, which also mean you need UPS for your WiFi network+NAS if you go this way. I'm running it with Frigate, and communicate over MQTT to Home Assistant, so cameras can be viewed in HA and react to events and so on.

          This setup hasn't been problem free though, not sure if it's the cameras that overheat or something, but I need to reboot them every 48h or so, or they lock up, but at least Frigate been working out well for me.

          > After a few days of digging around for answers (I even asked gpt-4o, but no luck),

          I'm surprised GPT didn't suggest a local HA setup, when I went looking some years ago when I first got started with HA, Zigbee and everything 100% local seemed like the obvious solution based on what I found around in the HA communities.

          • vghaisas2 hours ago
            Interesting info about the cameras, thanks!

            > I'm surprised GPT didn't suggest a local HA setup

            I had already bought the Blink doorbell at the time, so I was specifically asking: how do I make it play a sound on my Google home mini?

  • bell-cot2 hours ago
    Ya know you're old when such things instantly remind you of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rube_Goldberg_machine
    • vghaisas2 hours ago
      That was actually the original title! It's still the URL though :)