Hacker News Reader

Comment by dmje | Hacker News Reader

The "long range doorbell that doesn't do evil things" seems like a product space that is a bit of a vacuum.

We've recently had an office built at the end of our garden. Finding a doorbell that will work from the front of our house has been a futile mission so far. I have little interest in a camera, I certainly have no need to connect anything to my (lack of) smart home. I just want a thing that rings in my shed when someone pushes the house bell.

"Long range" wireless bells just don't seem to cut it. Everything else is massively over engineered. It's a strange thing that maybe my best solution seems to be running a very long wire down the garden...!

View on HN

Save yourself from all the disillusionments in the future and run that wire.

Indeed, and if it stops working, debugging the wire will be much easier than reverse-engineering an obsolete mobile application.

If you need wireless and are not adverse to some tinkering, a pair of Arduinos, a button, a buzzer and a pair of RF 433MHz transceivers [1] may do the trick!

[1] https://randomnerdtutorials.com/rf-433mhz-transmitter-receiv...

Rather than trying to add a button at the front door, tap into your existing buzzer (or listen to it, maybe with an accelerometer on the Arduino)

I use the live feed from the Reaper drone overhead.

This seems like a good use case for LoRa wireless modules, I haven't used them personally, but they claim a range of 10 miles without obstacles. Try searching for "LoRaWAN Door Bell" if you want off-the-shelf products, or otherwise for "Arduino + LoRa" if you want to DIY :-)

I can recommend moteino - Arduino with a Lora transceiver piggy backed on it.

I embarked on a fun lockdown project retrofitting our traditional doorbell (which runs off a 12V AC transformer in the basement) to generate MQTT messages for logging and to trigger notifications (phone, pop-ups on my workstation, sonos noises, hue lighting flashes etc). I have the same problem of not hearing the front door from my office in the loft.

I ended up with an ESP-32 module connected to the house wifi, and an opto-isolated circuit to trigger it from the doorbell wiring. It sits in the basement where it's easy to give it power from a USB power adaptor.

Of course, the irony was that it was only after I'd lost a few days going down this particular rabbit hole that I discovered that almost every visitor (and especially delivery drivers) uses our door _knocker_, rather than the doorbell since it's much more obvious! The next project may be to electrify that, or mount a vibration sensor on the door!

Or just remove the door knocker :)

Not if it looks great!

I just bought a house and discovered that it has a working long-tube door chime system! It’s got 3 brass tubes, each over a meter long, perfectly tuned and plays a short musical number when someone presses the button. You can sure hear it anywhere in the house, but I really like this MQTT idea!

How about a baby phone near your door bell and one in your office?

My solution was to attach a little board from https://www.particle.io/ to a doorbell ringer to detect when the doorbell rings, which pokes a port on a PC in my office that is always on anyway. The PC uses ffmpeg to play a sound.

Something like this?

https://m.banggood.com/DIGOO-DG-DB1-433MHz-Wireless-Doorbell...

I think that's similar to the one they are referring to; does it have the range to pass through a house into the back yard?

what about hearing what's going on at the front door? a small pipe from door to office that transmits sounds (door bell or whatever is happening at front door)

Do you have wifi in the office?

There's the August doorbell.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com