Privacy friendly ESP32 smart doorbell with Home Assistant local integration | Hacker News Reader

Privacy friendly ESP32 smart doorbell with Home Assistant local integration

tristam.ie

393 pointsrcarmo162 comments

Nice. I like the lights.

You can also slap a reed switch (e.g. a normal door open/close sensor) near your dumb doorbell's magnetic coils that do the ringer and have it send the info to home assistant.

I hooked a $0.50 reed switch up to my dumb doorbell and ran it to a digital IO port on a ESP that's powered from the same power source as the doorbell coils. When it senses a doorbell press, it sends me an email snapshot from my local-only front door cam and plays a recording of the doorbell chime on my upstairs stereo (where otherwise I can't really hear the chime). Very convenient and fun.

Originally, I tried monitoring voltage on the coils with the analog input, but it was way too unreliable. The simpler reed switch method of detecting current is rock solid.

> same power source as the doorbell coils

Beautiful thinking. I wonder what other obscure sources for voltage in a house could be used? The HVAC head unit, analog telephone, ...

The POTS [(Plain Old Telephone Service)] phone line, with all phones on-hook, should measure around 48 volts DC. This drops down to the 3 to 9 volt range when a telephone on the line goes off-hook. An off-hook telephone typically draws about 20 milliamps of DC current to operate, at a DC resistance around 180 ohms. The remaining voltage drop occurs over the copper wire path and over the telephone company circuits where there is usually 200 to 400 ohms of series resistance to protect from short circuits and decouple the audiocircuits.

https://www.jkaudio.com/article_03.htm

If the POTS cables daisy-chained between the telephone jacks after the telco's box are 4-pair Ethernet, there are 8 wires between each receptacle/port less 2 wires for each phone line. If only one phone line has ever been connected and there are 4pair (Ethernet,) cables between the phone jacks, there are 3 spare wire pairs that could be connected in a local private closed loop in order to carry (modulated) DC voltage for other applications; though you'd need to put like a thermal sticker label after the box and behind/on all the phone jacks to warn about the voltage (which is a presumed risk when handling 4pair cabling as an installer, as a (demo) contractor, as a future occupant)

Gigabit Ethernet uses all 4 pairs for data, so Gigabit PoE and faster must have data+power on one or more pairs.

From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_over_Ethernet :

> In addition to standardizing existing practice for spare-pair (Alternative B), common-mode data pair power (Alternative A) and 4-pair transmission (4PPoE), the IEEE PoE standards provide for signaling between the power sourcing equipment (PSE) and powered device (PD). This signaling allows the presence of a conformant device to be detected by the power source, and allows the device and source to negotiate the amount of power required or available while avoiding damage to non-compatible devices.

I did exactly the same and use an Aqara Zigbee contact sensor (which has a reed switch inside) inserted into the actual doorbell (which has a convenient flat spot above the coil). Works great.

Yes, this is the "consumer grade" version of this that doesn't require any ESP programming or whatever. Easy and simple, integrates with other hubs just fine. Brilliant.

> You can also slap a reed switch (e.g. a normal door open/close sensor) near your dumb doorbell's magnetic coils

> The simpler reed switch method of detecting current is rock solid.

That's really clever! I'm gonna try that. Thanks for sharing.

Do you have problems with reed switches getting stuck? I've had fantastic luck with hall sensors for this purpose, but maybe I was just looking at low quality reed switches.

Never, at least that I've noticed. I guess it'd be hard to tell if I missed any doorbell rings technically.

No, in the cases that I'm talking about it gets stuck in one position. If you google "reed switch stuck" you'll see what I'm talking about. I figured that a hall sensor has no moving parts so it should last essentially forever.

When contacts, including reed switches, normal switches, relays, etc, get stuck, it usually is because of sparks due to voltage spikes that weld the contacts together. this happens when contacts are used with high currents/voltages and/or inductive loads, and can be avoided using so called snubber networks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snubber

Ah, that's interesting. So for OP's purpose it will likely run indefinitely since there's essentially zero load.

Reed switches are great like this.

I have used them in a similar way stuck to the top case of relays to detect when the coil is energized without probing directly into the control or load circuits.

All I want for these IoT things is being non-cloud dependent and PoE. I will run a billion wires before dealing with stupid batteries that keep dying, and they’re getting so expensive, too.

Yep. Running the wires once is a big pain but it is linear at worst, more devices requires more wires, maybe even log growth since you can branch at junction boxes that already exist. Changing the batteries once a year is only a little pain, but it adds up fast when you have dozens of them, and it takes place routinely so it no better than linear growth.

The door lock not being able to unlock because the batteries had died trying to keep marginal Wi-Fi operating was the kicker for me. Very annoying.

Home infrastructure for power and data is due for a switch. Copper is expensive, and running 120V at 15A everywhere is really overkill with a 3w led bulb being blindingly bright and needing dc. Electronics largely are all hooked to USB-c chargers at this point. The poe to USB-c splitters are largely 5v at this point, but poe can produce over 70W depending on type, so it doesn't have to stay that way. Ideally, daya could be bridged as well, plug in usb-c start charging and it looks like a network adapter too. The number of things that need more than 70w isn't that high. Kitchen mostly. Bigger TVs. Real beefy laptops or desktop computers. If they made a new POE standard that could support USB PD3.1 you could run anything outside the kitchen other than the a/c. That would probably mean a new cable standard though. Even just as things stand, POE could largely replace electrical wiring outside the kitchen.

It's Big Wallwart, keeping us all down to prop up the transformer industry!

More seriously, would there be any electrical or interference issues with running usb-c power delivery cables everywhere?

The problem with low-voltage is lengths. I don't know how far USB-C as such can reasonably go.

PoE, of course, can go as far as the ethernet (usually) and so any future low-voltage system in homes will probably be based on it (it's already used in some commercial setups).

The other problem is wire size, since the amps go up as volts go down, and the heat generated in the wire is proportional to the amps, not the watts.

So to carry the same power, a lower voltage wire has to be thicker.

Yeah, the advantage is when the power usages is way below normal mains. We already see it (I have lights in my kitchen that have one transformer connected to the mains, and then all the rest of the wiring is low-voltage).

There's a reason why you want higher voltages: to minimize losses in conduits; i.e. you can move more effectively 12W in 120V/0.1A rather than 12V/1A -- the lower current, the lower resistance.

There are no 12V standards for wiring buildings, because effectivity-wise, it make no sense. Even the above-mentioned PoE is 48-56V (56V, so it can be 48V at the other end of up to the 100m long cable). The 5-12-20V USB PD is for relatively short cables, not for something that goes around your house.

Thank you for the informative reply, Lord Patrician!

Is it straightforward to step down the voltage from PoE to something that USB-C can use? My Forest M Mims Electronics book sits unread and dusty in a box somewhere so I'm not really able to interpret the schematics google is showing me :/ (apologies for extra questions)

There are PoE-to-USBC adapters available; random pick on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B087F4QCTR (this one is af, 5V/12W and plain USB; no at, no QC or PD. If you need that, you will surely find it).

For DYI, there are dc-to-dc convertors available. Or do you intent to build your own?

It was more for curiosity's sake, but it's really cool that there's already converters. My project is very much in the "hey it would be nice if" stage right now, but I'm on the Python track at Exercism and want some "small" projects lined up once I'm finished there.

The idea is: pull in a quick 3D sketch of a home. Place (USB-C via PoE-power?) ESP32/Pi/Other devices at specific points with very precise measurements between them. Use them to determine the exact position in 3D house-space of Bluetooth low energy beacons. Use that info to help my very ADD wife find the things she loses. (because Tiles often fail)

A lot of the code to calculate position from timings already seems to be out there so I can cargo-cult things over.

In a far-too-roundabout way, that sorta kinda answers your question.

what's the difference in having a 120v->5v wall wart vs 48v->5v one?

Usually it's inside the wall (you can do this with USB outlets, too, which I recommend if you've already got 120v power).

But people who are uncomfortable running mains will often be fine running "low voltage" lines like ethernet.

It's a shame LK-99 didn't pan out. Cheap superconducting wire would have been awesome for this.

> the lower current, the lower resistance

The lower the current, the lower the losses. Resistance doesn't change. I^2*R is what decreases with current.

Ring mains in UK are 230V and is a more frugal approach to conductor usage, both because of higher voltage and the wiring being a ring.

You tea-lovers can also boil water electrically twice as fast as we can, it's unfair. I've seriously considered adding a UK-style 230v plug to the kitchen so I can use an imported electric kettle.

can you tap into your oven/stove 220v source? unless you're boiling water non-stop while trying to bake the thanksgiving turkey at the same time, there shouldn't be an issue

Most ways of doing that won't be to code. It would be better to add it as a separate circuit.

Code lets you do the weirdest things - you can't tap into the oven circuit with a separate outlet, but you can install a sub panel in place of the oven outlet, then run two lines from the sub panel, one to the oven outlet, and one to the kitchen plug.

All they care about is that you can't run more current down a wire than it's rated for.

My house is over a century old, nothing is to code anyway. I'm wondering if I could get away with a 20A 120v line meant for a microwave, and swap the neutral to the other leg and wire it to a type e connector. Type e is 16a so the current is fine, but the insulation was intended to separate 120 not 240.

The insulation is rated for 600v almost certainly unless you're running the original knob and tube, in which case you have other issues to consider.

Each leg of 240 is only 120, so it'd probably work.

Don't do it! But if you do it make sure it's breakered correctly and use a AFCI/GFCI combo breaker.

I went and asked an electrician. With a 240V 15A breaker it is completely to code as long as there is absolutely nothing else on the circuit. If there are lights or light switches it is a no go, and if there are other outlets, they would have to be either removed or swapped to the type e outlet as well. I find it weird they don't have a neutral ober there.

You can buy UL-certified commercial products that intelligently split a 240V outlet to two different loads.[0] They're popular in the EV community for avoiding the cost of a dedicated circuit for charging.

[0] https://getneocharge.com/products/neocharge-smart-splitter

$300 to not have to unplug your dryer to plugin your EV charger.

Hair straighteners and hairdryers also work better in the UK than they do in the U.S. for the same reason.

We have some IEC 60309 outlets for IT/AV equipment cabinets wired as 2P+E with both phases presented for 240V (no neutral). You can get PDUs which are happy with 200-250V, and the PSUs in a lot of servers and switches are happy with 100-250V 50-60Hz.

Our thermostats are 230V too, so stupid

Ubiquiti are using PoE for almost everything. It’s nice to be able to run a network cable and have it power cameras, wifi access points, switches, etc.

I know they've had their ups/downs in terms of business models and security (and product availabillity!) but I'm moving almost fully to Unifi for that reason. I don't want 120v power cords everywhere, I like the managed aspect of it. Cat6 into either powered PoE switches or PoE to PoE switches that are hard to reach so that multiple nearby devices can be used is so nice.

Leviton already makes the power version of this in my opinion:

https://www.leviton.com/en/products/residential/usb-charger-...

Move the USB-C PD inverters to be integrated into the outlets, instead of plugged in on top. I already did this upgrade for all counter-height outlets in my kitchen, and it's great!

The holy grail, of course, would be ethernet/data as well, but that is far more cost prohibitive

Those are nice for reducing clutter (I have some), but you're still running 120v on 12ga copper into every one of them.

I’m working on building a home and have been investigating this seriously. I want to put multiple POE outlets in every room, and running them to places that are common for automation (eg for cameras, motion sensors, control displays, etc). I wish I could get wired sensors for doors/windows but the pricing is honestly way higher than just Zigbee with a battery once for factor in wires in the walls and a centralized patch panel.

I never thought about converting POE to USBC-PD but that would be a great thing to add to the “office” and locations where someone may very occasionally want power for a laptop (eg near couch, beds)

I’m exclusively using “normal” 120v outlets that also have a 5v usb port on it, and placing extra where I can, which is less crazy but still practical.

If you need to run 15A across the room anyway, might as well use it for everything. 120v can carry more power with less copper.

We have separate lighting circuit that we could switch, but that's about it. And at that point it would be easier just to allow for thimmer 22AWG 120v 0.8A lines or something.

But electric codes assume people might want incandescents, that's not possible with just PoE.

I'd love it if we had wall outlets for USB that look like network adapters to the PC though. Why do we still use RJ45 when consumer stuff doesn't get past 1gbps?

Pretty much all door locks have apps which will tell you weeks in advance to change the batteries. I have a Schlage that has been rocking 4AA batteries for over 2 years.

I find Zigbee a great protocol for that. It runs locally (doesn't even go on wifi), and the sensors last for years on a coin cell.

Yeah, Zigbee works well.

The real killer is when you want to "do something physical" in the real world on batteries, like unlock a door, etc.

That nobody has come up with a powered doorjamb instead of powered deadbolts is annoying; I'll have to build one myself using something like https://www.americanlocksets.com/hes-1006cdb-electric-smart-...

Ah, yeah, mechanical things require a lot of energy, unfortunately.

That said, I'd love an ESP32 for Zigbee. I bought an H2, but the documentation hasn't been good enough that I could make it work.

PoE ESP32 for DIY IoT, fyi:

Non-isolated: https://www.olimex.com/Products/IoT/ESP32/ESP32-POE/open-sou...

Isolated: https://www.olimex.com/Products/IoT/ESP32/ESP32-POE-ISO/open...

Awesome, I've been using the wESP (https://wesp32.com/) for most things but I like the size (and price point) of these.

Granted, they fit different use cases as the wESP has more I/O exposed but is quite a bit larger.

These little boards are great - I'd recommend the isolated version for anything that might be referenced back to ground potential.

We have one in an OpenEVSE, it's been ticking along no problems for a couple years now. In that scenario, in theory the PoE allows the ESP32 to detect if the EVSE breaker pops - I've not had that happen, but it seemed like a worthwhile feature to consider ;).

That looks great. The 0-70C operating range is noteworthy if you want to use it for a doorbell, though.

If you're worried about sub-zero temperatures, couldn't you just have it busy-loop or even drive a small heater to generate heat? Just enough to keep the doorbell enclosure warm.

If it's running off PoE it's not like you have to worry about battery budget or efficiency so much.

Not sure if there are insulating materials available that provide good thermal insulation but not acoustic insulation?

Can't help you with PoE, but Home Assistant is non-cloud by default.

I want solar powered. The doorbell probably gets pressed what, once in 5 days? Cover the enclosure of that thing in solar panels and have some super-capacitors for overnight power.

Those batteries are really annoying yes. Also these battery devices tend to be unstable. Every week I have to either re-pair something or swap out a battery.

When I get my own place I'll get KNX.

offtopic: My wife has fairly extreme ADD and loses stuff a lot. Tiles only work to locate something within a certain distance, and often seem to break.

I know it's a longshot, but has anyone here created a home positioning system for home that can use Bluetooth low energy beacons to locate objects to within a couple of centimetres in 3D space?

More ontopic: ESP32s are pretty amazing. Although I've not been able to keep mine stable and connected to wifi with MicroPython or CircuitPython, the range of stuff that's possible is astonishing. Mine is fairly old, I probably should get a newer one to see if it makes a difference.

DIY Airtags: https://github.com/seemoo-lab/openhaystack

Thank you!

Thanks for sharing this, really cool how they can piggy back on the Apple "Find My" network.

I have ESP32 devkit board running micropython that is connected to Wi-Fi and MQTT and publishes sensor readings 24/7 for weeks without any issues

What type of ESP32 is it? S3?

ESP32-WROOM (https://amzn.eu/d/eWz90s8)

Thanks for this. I had no idea a ESP32 board with built-in PoE existed. I've been using a PoE to micro-USB adapter to power a ESP board. While it works, the adapter just doesn't look very clean when mounted on wall.

There are a few; the wESP32 [1] is the nicest I've used but the Olimex ESP32-POE [2] is widely used too.

The maker of the wESP32 also recently released a neat RP2040 based PoE solution you may be interested in: the RP2040-Shim [3] to match the already-existing PoE-FeatherWing [4]. Together, they're a small, neat solution.

(Not involved with those products, just found them well-designed/interesting.)

[1] https://wesp32.com/ [2] https://www.olimex.com/Products/IoT/ESP32/ESP32-POE/open-sou... [3] https://silicognition.com/Products/rp2040-shim/ [4] https://silicognition.com/Products/poe-featherwing/

>MicroPython or CircuitPython

Well, what do you expect? These are verboten for any kind of reliable embedded system.

On the contrary Micropython is even used in medical devices.

I've used it extensively and it is great. With ESP32 peripherals you can even get extremely tight timings depending on what specifically you need. And of course any specific performance critical code can be written in C and everything else can be micropython.

It's great, definitely worth exploring.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YovngSLXoxw

Moreover you can even work with the ULP co-processor from micropython using assembly directly from micropython code. https://github.com/micropython/micropython-esp32-ulp

Trezor hardware crypto wallet is also running on micropython

Not quite to your specs, but have you tried https://www.room-assistant.io/?

It's interesting how in some places in the world the presence of a doorbell is so important that there's a need to make it "smart". The success of smart doorbell products demonstrates this need nicely.

I have no doorbell. If a visitor does not know how to get hold of me or the other inhabitants of my property, then they probably have no business being there in the first place.

I am not alone in this. Most people in my street are the same (based on my very unscientific study last week while out on a walk), and probably most of my city is like this (again, based on my own unscientific study)

Our houses in the UK are so small that a knock usually suffices.

Doorbells feel anachronistic. Barely anyone on my street has one!

> I have no doorbell. If a visitor does not know how to get hold of me or the other inhabitants of my property, then they probably have no business being there in the first place.

Sounds pretty cold. I've had neighbors come over to introduce themselves, some even with welcoming gifts when we bought the house and moved in. I'd hate to just shut myself out of the society like that.

When someone comes to my door, they're probably either salesmen or religious. It's awkward to send them away -- by design. The typical etiquette in my locale is to call or text ahead. If there's a delivery truck at the curb, then it's a delivery.

"Society" has done this to us.

I see how that works once your neighbors have your phone number, but what about that first introduction?

> I've had neighbors come over to introduce themselves, some even with welcoming gifts when we bought the house and moved in.

We met while shoveling snow, or across the fences. ;-) Still, that was 20 years ago.

It's not like we have a moat and drawbridge. Not answering the door is a generalization, that admits of exceptions.

Do you never order any packages off the internet? Or receive certified mail from the tax authority? The reason smart doorbells in particular have taken off is that it’s an easy place to tap into a power source that’s already available outside of the home.

The delivery person has my number, because it's on my order / courier waybill. They typically phone me. I have a fence, so my door is not accessible from the street for a knock.

I have a postbox at my local post office. My official mailing address points there. My tax authorty and (and all other governmental or official correspondence for that matter) is sent via email. I get almost no paper mail these days, and most of what I do get is junk.

I think some demand for smart doorbells is to handle the “unknown visitor” problem: notify the homeowner that someone is at the door even when they’re away from home, and the ability to disguise that the house is unoccupied.

Also lets you tell when people approach the door but don't ring, especially if you have some kind of person detection going. My mailman drops stuff on the porch all the time and never bothers to ring the doorbell which is annoying, but I get a little beep and a thumbnail inside from my home automation platform to let me know someone was on the porch.

Plus generally having a recording of your front porch area is useful for security. I've been able to pull video recordings of stuff to prove/disprove things happened, for instance when the mailman ran over a bunch of stuff in my front yard and drove off.

Where do you live?

South Africa, in the suburbs of one of the major cities.

How does someone passing tell you you've left your headlights on. (Or a million similar examples).

It's not really that people wanted the doorbell to be made "smart"; it's that advances in consumer electronics eventually enabled the existence of a security/surveillance camera that can be easily deployed to a high-priority location (your entrance) using the ~20V power supply most homes already have wired into the perfect location for it.

Based on reviews I've seen, the Reolink doorbell camera seems to be the only commercial option that fits the author's requirements. It works locally and can be integrated into Home Assistant. It does however require a separate app for the intercom but the author's homegrown solution does not seem to provide any audio communication and there doesn't seem to be a way to have two-way audio in Home Assistant directly, at least not via the camera protocol.

UniFi Doorbell? It doesn’t require a cloud connection and remains local, can be integrated into HomeAssistant / Scrypted / Homebridge.

UniFi doorbell requires a UniFi NVR, and maybe UniFi console/ AP. The non-pro doorbells require wifi. POE is only an option on the with the Pro doorbells via a proprietary USB-C to POE cable.

I am currently using 2 of the G4 Pro doorbells. They are direct PoE to my UDM-Pro SE without any adapters. The recordings are stored locally and are private.

Your UDM-Pro-SE is where you run your Unifi Protect. I.e. you need to have another device from the same vendor that supports NVR functionality.

The above mentioned Reolink doorbell will happily run with any NVR from any other vendor that supports relevant standards (ONVIF). Or even without NVR (it has microsd slot for local storage on device).

My UDM-Pro-SE has a 12TB hard drive in it and acts as the NVR itself without issues. I do not need any APs (doorbells are direct wired PoE), and I do not need a separate NVR.

Yes but the UDM-Pro-SE is a separate product from the doorbell. The Reolink doorbell does not need a separate product to function. You can just get a POE injector or POE switch from any brand, run Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi or NUC and it'll work. The UDM acts as an NVR for your doorbell camera, you couldn't use it without it, right?

You can run UniFi console as software on any* device to manage the doorbell, which would then allow you to use Scrypted as the NVR and expose it to Home Assistant.

The doorbell doesn’t require a UniFi NVR.

They have released a standalone POE product, separate from the WiFi offering which has the USB-C to POE cable.

The console can be self-hosted on any device.

Amcrest makes one as well that supports local-only and integrates with home assistant.

ESP32 is such a rabbit hole. I have so many projects using or in development with them. And now I have another one to keep in mind. Thanks OP!

Which ones are you building?

LED strip light controller. The cheap ones have none or limited integration with most HA platforms and I can't justify spending on the more expensive ones just to add Homekit.

AQ monitor. I work indoors a lot and I think the migraines I've been getting might be caused by dust, VOCs, or pollutants. So will be good to back that with some data.

Robots. Lots and lots of robots. Some roll. Some walk. None of them do anything useful. :-)

Here's my RGB (not WS2812) strip controller, for inspiration: https://gitlab.com/stavros/gamelights

This is awesome and much appreciated. I'm still prototyping on a breadboard but now I've got something to build off of. Grazie!

Prego! If your LEDs are WS2812, they're much easier to build for, but a high-amperage 5V power supply is harder to find.

What a cool project. ESP 32 cameras can be produce a pretty poor quality picture. It would be helpful to have a picture from the doorbell at full resolution on the blog

Great project! I love to see the various ESP32 doorbells that makers come up with.

It would be nice to see some example videos or pictures. I’ve played with ESP32 Cams in the past and, while they are impressive for what they are, they weren’t at the quality I, personally, would want. Granted, my smart doorbell use case is more security focused than just general “is someone there”.

I'm currently running a very expensive PoE doorbell that I was able to buy in 'AS-IS' condition to save some money. It's an Axis Communications product.

I really love the ability to listen for ONVIF events; it expands the flexibility of products like this because you can essentially do whatever you want if you consume the events. There are even ways to create custom events (for example, if someone covers the camera lens with their hands, etc).

Home Assistant has excellent ONVIF support - I'd like to create a wrapper of sorts around scripts (Boolean door open, door close stuff) in order to get the native ONVIF events

One of the comments on this site pointed out performance issues with the esp32. I never worked with IoT devices or these boards but I would like to dabble since they are relatively inexpensive but it got me to look up and find out that the esp32 is manufactured in a 40nm process node. Are there like newer iterations with more performance at similar power budgets manufactured at more advanced nodes?

Not really. There are newer iterations of the chips (including RISCV and Zigbee/Thread versions) but you won't see drastic performance/power improvements. Performance limitations are par for the course for this segment of the market, it's the tradeoff you make. There are also better SoC families that can get you a better tradeoff, but there aren't many as friendly to hobbyists as the ESP32. Maybe Nordic, or going into something more like a small SBC like the Pi Zero?

That said the ESP32 is far more powerful than you need for the vast majority of home automation type devices, it's only a handful of more intensive tasks like streaming video or ML where you start to run into issues. Even then you can often still do quite a lot if you're clever.

2 cores of 240 MHz RISC is quite powerful. 40nm is not bad for microcontrollers. For example, the competing nRF52 series from Nordic is made on 55nm process.

I wired the normal doorbell button to a Zooz ZEN17 (Zwave smart relay with additional inputs). That's paired with ZwaveJS which sends out MQTT messages on button pushes. That triggers Node-Red which pulls a screenshot off from separate front door security camera and sends that to my phone and the wives phone using Pushover.

Keep meaning to get around to Frigate for smarter alerts as well, for people detection.

Doesn’t the ESP32 have internal pull-up resistors, thereby making that extra resistor unnecessary?

It's a pull-down resistor.

I believe there's also an INPUT_PULLDOWN option, at least on some of the pins.

I wonder if the following would do the trick at line #47 [0]:

    pin:
      number: GPIO14
      mode: INPUT_PULLDOWN

This is a suggestion based purely on two minutes of web search, not on experience, though.

[0] https://github.com/thatguy-za/esp32-cam-doorbell/blob/main/e...

The ESP32 does have internal pull-up and pull-down resistors on certain pins. I believe GPIO14 on this board maps to GPIO22 on the ESP32 chip (mismatched IO pin labels is bit of a pet peeve for me!) which does have pull-up and pull-down resistors that can be enabled. If it were me, I might tie the doorbell switch button from GPIO0 to ground. This pin has a pull-up resistor as it needs to be high to boot normally. So this has the added benefit that you can hold the button in when you first power the device to put it in flash mode, which also eliminates their "Make sure to get one with a “flash/download/io0” button" warning.

If you have an "old fashioned" 24VAC line, you could add a rectifier and buck/step-down power module to drop that to 5VDC. Or just unhook the 24VAC transformer and install a 5VDC one.

It would have been neat to see how much the RGB ring lighting up white helps in no/low light cases. All in all, nice writeup!

Very relevant to my interests. My plan right now is when we send my teen off to college to build a house to passive house standards, and in the process wire it up to do all the smart home things in a locally controlled/non-cloud manner.

Local cameras have been a thing forever, as is local access control and thermostats, but video doorbells surprisingly have primarily been cloud based in their history.

I haven’t gone super deep into home assistant yet, but my plan is to use a mix of direct control and HomeKit commercial offerings.

"Privacy friendly"

Time was, if a neighbour insisted on daily filming a family entering and leaving their own home, they would have been given a smack in the mouth for being a nosy bastard.

Quite how recording your neighbours has become socially acceptable I will never understand.

Due to the prevalence of porch pirates, people compromised.

I refuse to have cloud connected cameras, but I understand why my neighbors have made the choices they have.

Clearly the porch pirate problem is best solved by the delivery people not leaving stuff on porches. This does not happen in other countries.

What do the delivery people do instead?

You get an email, SMS (“text message” for non-Europeans), or a paper in your (physical) mailbox informing you that you have a package waiting at such-and-such a place (within walking distance if in a city), or there’s a reference to how you can choose your pickup spot from a handful of options.

In a city, porch piracy is a non-issue if you live in an apartment building with a lobby. You can open the door to the lobby remotely.

I wonder if a remotely openable porch-side "mail box" would find a market.

That's an option in the US, but going to Walgreens to pick up every package is a much bigger hassle than just opening your door. In very high-crime areas, that's what people do (or get their own lockbox), but in most places in the US trying to prevent the crime is still more popular than trying to avoid it.

Where I live you had to be home to receive packages. If you weren't, you had to go to a distribution centre to collect them. During the pandemic it seemed to change, so now they just leave them at your front door, and it hasn't gone back.

Leave it with a neighbour, attempt redelivery the next day, let you collect it from a delivery office, hide it in a less obvious safe place.

Usually they give you the choice of what to do.

Though having said that, I live in the UK and do occasionally just get parcels left on my very public doorstep. It's the exception though.

Speaking of porch pirates, what are you going to do when a porch pirate strikes your house? Take down their license plate? Call the police?

I'm cynical, but I imagine it goes like this:

"Hello, this is 911, how can we help you?"

"I'd like to report a 39.99 board game stolen off my porch, license plate ZXX-1234"

"Sir, this line is for emergencies. Have you filed a claim with Amazon?"

Porch cameras drive mass paranoia. If you're not prepared to act on the information yourself, you're just feeding your own fear.

There is a non 911 phone number for contacting local police if not in an emergency.

True, but they're still not going to do anything about your stolen package. You could have video evidence and a license plate. Doesn't matter.

A thief like that doesn't steal just one package. Multiple thefts like that can easily add up to a felony amount. This is why the theft still should be reported. The cops won't look for that package specifically, but they could bust that thief for something else.

Not always true.

Our package got nabbed, a person noticed the empty box tossed on a nearby street and called the cops. Cops got video from a near by house an image of a unique car; month later they saw the car, arrested him.

He paid for the package and got community service.

You post the image to Nextdoor and everyone comments on the decline of western civilization and moves on with their days.

An Amazon driver left a parcel for me and didn't ring the bell, then a few minutes later someone stole it. I ran outside, chased them down and took it back.

The police took the report, but obviously they weren't interested in coming out to take the details of the thief or help me recover the package.

The doorbells also notify you of packages that have been left outside and let you answer the door remotely, which are both useful even if you can't go Blade Runner.

Porch pirates and various vandals.

Of course, Rings are essentially worthless for vehicle identification. You would need LPC (License Plate Capture) cameras set up in two directions just for that. They aren't even particularly good for facial identification.

Really, if you wanted something actionable, you would do what I had seen someone else done, which was capture plates and have the right cameras and ... as the secret sauce, an IMEI catcher, filtering out the usuals and highlighting who just blasted past.

If it is one of the Kia Boys around here, they just get out and re-offend.

Which is why this is illegal in a lot of jurisdictions (if you can see outside of your own yard).

Which jurisdictions? In the US, at least, you can legally film anything and anyone from your own property, and from public property like roads, sidewalks, parks, etc.

EU (see comment above).

In some jurisdictions even worse: not just outside your own yard, but also publicly-available parts of your own yard (i.e. in front of a gate or fence, or specifically separated areas available to wandering members of public).

If it's publicly available, it isn't part of your yard.

This is all done by government to effectively disempower the citizens from doing things themselves or in any sort of cooperative manner (even if provably safe etc etc). Oddly enough they turn around and then refuse to protect the citizens from such petty crime.

I'm starting to think it's all a giant "bullshit" test to see how far they can push people's obedience. Or they end up conveniently filtering out the people they don't act obedient to the level of filter they've set with their stupid laws and non-enforcement of existing ones like theft.

Uh? Is privacy really such a strange concept?

They're banning technology mostly because someone could use it for evil, or they believe that's a likely use, or because some people want to create a new level of expectation of privacy that didn't previously seem to exist, at least not that I noticed. CCTV was everywhere for years, and it didn't seem like most of the general public had any issues.

It's not like people want to put up telescope cams into your bathroom, I think most people would be very against that.

Meanwhile they try to take encryption and anonymity tech away from citizens, in those same exact places.

A guy advocates assault and then wonders why people are filming everything.

> Quite how recording your neighbours has become socially acceptable I will never understand

It isnt - I consider it a blank cheque for 100k whenever I want to cash it.

How? I’m curious if you can share any case precedent, particularly examples of such a high amount being awarded?

In most U.S. jurisdictions, including WA (which has some of the more stringent law regulating recording), if you’re stood on their property or even on the street, surveillance of you is legal. About the only obligation you may have is to post signage.

Recording audio conversations is a bit trickier. In WA, they have RCW 9.73.110 [1] which does make provision for any cameras “within [the] building” recording audio — it’s therefore generally best for exterior cameras to *not* record audio given WA is a two-party consent state (with a few exceptions).

Edit: Looks like the person making this ESP32-based solution is in Ireland, which has its own peculiarities but with a bit of effort, it seems like you’d have no issues there either [2].

[1] https://app.leg.wa.gov/RCW/default.aspx?cite=9.73.110

[2] https://smartzone.ie/are-home-cctv-systems-legal-in-ireland-...

I am referring to surveillence of myself on my property.

UK: https://www.brettwilson.co.uk/blog/neighbour-cctv-harassment...

https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Fairhurs...

Previously - Scotland: https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=854e9b90-2dab...

Daily Mail on the issue: Could EVERY doorbell camera owner face £100,000 fine after landmark ruling? How inadvertently filming neighbours and storing footage breaches their privacy under new data protection laws https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10087671/EVERY-Ring...

Depending on the specific circumstances, the domestic use of CCTV could be challenged if its use amounted to harassment under the Protection from Harassment Act 1997.

“Up to £100k”, damages don’t appear to have been decided in that case based on a Google? It’s also a case which has some egregious aspects to it, which the Daily Mail is ignoring in their haste to write another sensationalist headline.

Some of the analysis away from the front pages has been interesting [1] though:

“During the hearing, some of the main issues under investigation related to:

the field and depth of view of each camera, in particular whether they couldn't ‘see’ Dr Fairhurst or her visitors entering and leaving her property, her car, or the car park;

the sensitivity of their microphones;

the extent to which the devices activated themselves automatically, or were triggered, to capture, transmit or record video images and/or associated audio from the field of view;

whether Mr Woodard consulted neighbours sufficiently before installation or provided adequate notices or warnings after installation of the equipment; and

how and for what purpose Mr Woodard stored and processed the data produced by his devices.”

It looks like neighbor tried to solve this without a court case and he was perhaps not receptive to that approach.

[1] https://www.traverssmith.com/knowledge/knowledge-container/f...

That's kind of awful if someone trying to make themself safer with no intention to harass can be sued for that much.

This is exactly why I mostly like privacy laws but think they go slightly too far.

People have been idly watching their neighbors since neighbors have existed.

The problem becomes when a corporation begins filming most neighborhoods and then handing it over to the cops w/o a warrant.

As for the smacking of mouths, I'm glad certain norms have changed.

Is ESP32 "privacy friendly"? Is its firmware fully open source and contains no backdoors?

While I get your point, I think it's a case of the perfect being the enemy of the good. This project is miles away from being a Ring doorbell.

I guess the author found the ease of use of an ESP32 to be an acceptable tradeoff (or didn't consider its firmware to be a problem). Others may feel differently, and can modify their build accordingly.

The ESP32 can barely do what you want it to, let alone also run a yet undetected meaningful backdoor which will impact your privacy.

And even if it did run a backdoor, you've got all of your cameras on an isolated VLAN which can't access the internet (or anything else), right?

Block it at the router level to allow only LAN?

What would be a good alternative that doesn't have binary blob tho?

> Is [Espressif] firmware fully open source and contains no backdoors?

Their SDK is Apache licensed but does include some compiled radio-frequency stuff: https://github.com/espressif/esp32-wifi-lib/tree/master/esp3...

Is there a manufacturer that sells these things pre-assembled? I'm sure quite a few people would be ready to pay good money for privacy-respecting, open-source hardware in this area.

Why not use a pi zero if you have it at hand?

Then you might be able to do two way audio and video so you can speak to the person at the front door remotely.

An MCU uses less power, is faster to start from a quiescent state and typically is lower cost than hardware intended to support a full operating system.

That said, there are some who flash Pi Zeroes as "bare metal" or no operating system:

https://github.com/dwelch67/raspberrypi-zero

Can esp32 have lan + poe ?

So that you are not relying on WiFi?

There are ESP32 boards with ethernet and PoE. This device[0] uses one and it works very well.

I'm not aware of any ESP32 boards with a camera and ethernet though, but I haven't gone looking on AliExpress either. It's a reasonable combination, so I'd be surprised if it didn't exist.

[0] https://smartlight.me/smart-home-devices/zigbee-devices/smli...

You can probably get a PoE hat/board but I don't think it's built-in

Unifi gives you perfect local doorbell

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