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Comment by sirmoveon | Hacker News Reader

Can someone make an inexpensive PoE Doorbell? — IP camera FullHD or better, PoE, 2 way audio, with a button.

With the popularity of NVRs, there's a niche market for those unsatisfied.

I’m sure they could, but how many people have Ethernet at their doorbell? We recently built a new home, so I had the opportunity to hardwire all of our cameras, except the doorbells. There just weren’t great options that I could find. Luckily the Amcrest doorbells I chose have been rock solid. They support rtsp, so my NVR records them just like the rest of the cameras.

That's the point I'm trying to make. The popularity of having NVR systems with multiple cameras, rather than just a Doorbell makes it viable to think people would want this option over a supercharged Doorbell — The idea to process object detection at the doorbell is kind of ludicrous.

There's Ring Video Doorbell Elite, so the market isn't completely bare. Yes, it's Amazon and pricey, but it does exist.

"but how many people have Ethernet at their doorbell?"

With PoE and a UPS too.

Your front door by definition is on an outer edge of your house. You can run conduit externally or whatever internally. It isn't beyond the wit of man to deploy wiring. If you need your "smart" doorbell to always work then you will get ethernet to it and ideally PoE too to power it. A UPS will keep it alive when the power is out.

I also recommend that it is able to trigger a non smart chime too so if all "smart" stuff is unavailable, you still get notified.

When my home (Doorbird) doorbell is pressed: Separate battery backed chime goes off, Sonos speakers say "Ding dong, there is somebody at the door", TVs get a notification, our mobile phone apps twitter.

It is still possible to miss a doorbell press but quite hard. I do all my IoT stuff like that if possible - important stuff still works without the hub/internet/Home Assistant.

Did you pay ~USD$400 for a Doorbird doorbell ?

I used to use a doorbird, and for the same reasons as you, but I found the speaker and mic quality to be bad enough that I couldn’t live with it.

Usually I would try and talk to people over it and they wouldn’t even hear that I was talking. If I turned the volume up so that they notice, the over modulation was so bad that they couldn’t understand me.

I ended up just going with a Ring even though it goes against my cloud stance. At least it works.

PoE doorbells exist, but are rare.

The issue is that the proper size wire to provide power to a doorbell is larger than a Cat 5 cable. So if you run Cat 5 to your doorbell, you can't actually use it as a simple doorbell. (Cat 5 is 24 gauge, but you need 16 gauge for a doorbell.)

If you are building a house and you want to leave options for the home owner what do you do? PoE Cat 5? Or standard doorbell wire?

The market seems to have decided that you do a standard 16V AC 1A power to the doorbell, and then WiFi for the data.

See: https://support.ring.com/hc/en-us/articles/360041807292-Sele...

I believe that standard comes from the adaptation of conventional doorbells installations. In my opinion, what I see trending, is people wiring their houses for NVR systems with Cat5/6. In this scenario, a simplistic and cheap doorbell hardware, that connects to a PoE NVR and delegates all the object detection there, sounds far more valuable than a supercharged doorbell.

As you said, they exists but are rare (and expensive). It seems to me there is a niche market that nobody is recognizing and taking advantage of.

Personally I put in a standard doorbell wire, and then a Cat 5 wire above the door for a camera.

I suspect you could run PoE over 16 gauge cable, maybe not at gigabit, but good enough.

Or you could run something like this: https://www.cablesforless.com/bundled-cable-cat5e-and-4c-16a...

That product is just two cables stuck together. Instead you could just simply run both types of cable to the doorbell, especially since they'll probably go to different places.

I googled a bit and it seems you might be able to run low speed Ethernet over untwisted wires if they are not long.

10BASE-T1{S,L} [0] are "only" 10 Mbps but they also need only a single pair of wires (with the latter working up to 1 km).

They aren't exactly in widespread usage yet, though.

(ETA: And apparently there are even 100 and 1000 Mbps variants now too [0] -- with lower maximum distances, of course.)

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_over_twisted_pair#S...

A doorbell is only 2 wires -- if you pull Cat5 for future proofing, could you bind 2 or 4 of the 8 available wires to safely pull the current? Obviously, the other end can't be plugged into a network switch till it's properly wired up.

I don't have enough electrical know-how to figure out if this works...

Edit: Based on a table I found; 24 gauge wire has a resistance of about 25 ohms per foot, where as 16 gauge has a resistance of 4 ohms per foot. So; assuming each wire is a parallel resistor, 2 pairs(4 wires) would be about 6.25 ohms -- so it could heat up a bit more than proper wires. so .... maybe as long as someone doesn't hold the button down for too long?

*per 1000ft, not per foot

16 gauge is rated for 17A; 24 gauge is rated for 3A. Given that, as you say, the rated current for the doorbell is 1A, I don't understand why 16 gauge is necessary; if you're concerned about shorts, consider that 16A/16V would more likely burn out the transformer before doing anything to the wires because the power density is larger there. Just to be safe, I'd put 3A fuse inline and use Cat5 without reservations.

https://reolink.com/au/product/reolink-video-doorbell/

Not available yet but I believe they're aiming for this year. I have other Reolink cameras + NVR and it's pretty solid and doesn't rely on cloud at all

Nice find. It seems they were available since september and they are already out of stock. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4NQePbj4dM

The economics of hardware unfortunately do not allow "niche" and "low-cost" to go together. The market for PoE doorbells is very small as it is, so the unit-cost will be high, which makes the market too small for anyone to serve, except probably DIY.

With the amount of PoE IP cameras out there, I find it hard to believe adding a button would take much R&D.

A good chunk of the IP cameras have user-exposed pins that can send events when the circuit is closed, as well as detect if a circuit is open (NC/NO circuits). IIRC they are intended to detect if a door is open or closed.

I'm not sure if they are polling those contacts fast enough for 'normal' doorbell use, but it's there ...

Trivial things such as injection mold costs (to make a cheap, cost-effective case) mean that low-cost manufacturers avoid adding a button like a plague - we're seeing the exact same layout used by multiple products and in some cases even multiple manufacturers, we're seeing "unused buttons" just as to be able to use the exact same plastic parts instead of having to make a new mold for a new, slightly different part.

Cheap plastic shit is cheap only if you can make lots of them, because the variable cost is low - but as soon as you're talking about small quantities of niche products, the fixed costs dominate as soon as you try to do anything custom physically.

Unifi Protect Cameras + Scrypted to bring the cameras into Homekit + HKSV.

If you believe there’s a viable market, why not make it yourself and sell it instead of asking someone else to do it?

Your on Hacker News after all.

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