Box of Secrets: Discreetly modding an apartment intercom to work with Apple Home
jackhogan.me
jackhogan.me
I'm unsure if I should post the link or not as it's specific to Romania, but I love how janky the buids are: https://www.olx.ro/d/oferta/automatizare-interfon-electra-cu...
Eventually I got a Nuki Opener which works with all kinds of intercoms and is way less effort. Janky builds are awesome but better for the playground than as a solution you really want to be reliable for the whole family.
P.S. The code from the article should be linked more prominently [0], for anyone who wants to tinker.
But it also supports more complicated setups like digital intercoms where it will hook on the bus and learn the various codes that are sent for different operations, or enable the voice function through the phone app.
The biggest benefit is that if your intercom is compatible, it just works. It's the convenience, not that you can't get the same with a janky solution with enough elbow grease. No need to tinker with the firmware, the batteries last forever, and even in the most basic setup you'll have a few more advanced features.
I have it configured with a delayed opening so that it's not obvious, it doesn't require an app, and by the time you reach the door, the guest is almost there.
When I'm done with it, I flip the switch. It's hard to have it more reliable than this for me.
I've been considering smarter iterations for myself, but I didn't find enough time to fix something that is working really well.
For me the main point of unreliability was the power consumption of the ESP while connected to WiFi despite my efforts to lower that in idle. I had no good option to have it plugged in and it would go thorough a battery pack in days. And I had no option for Homekit integration at that time, or anything similar, so everything was done locally over WiFi.
I had a fortunate scenario, living on the ground floor and in WiFi range but if you live 10 floor up, when you reach the building door the only way to reach your device is via VPN. Giving access outside your household was off the table. Every component you add comes with potential reliability issues, and every non-transparent component adds usability issues.
For me this wasn't a way for visitors to get in easier, it was for me and the family to do it conveniently without pulling out the keys, or in case you have no key (lost, locked inside).
The Nuki solved that, all-in-one package, always working connectivity, no additional infra for me to maintain except working WiFi, and easy user management. Just an easy app to control everything from anywhere. Downside is that Nuki has to keep their infra up and running. And it's less fun than building my own jank :D.
When you buzz the apartment from the intercom it connects to a dedicated landline phone, That landline is setup to automatically go straight to voicemail, and then the voicemail message is just a recording of the tone required to open the door.
Then I have a smart power socket that the landline phone gets its power from - which I can toggle in the home app.
So if you turn on the power socket and dial the apartment code at the entrance, it buzzes you straight in. Or turn the power socket off and it doesn't.
I guess I'd also set it up so right after the voicemail message runs and lets someone in, it would turn the socket off.
But it wouldn't work for OP, whose door intercom can no longer make phone calls.
The intercom calls my voip number, which can be set two ways: 1) play DTMF tone 9 to let the person in, then hang up (which is a security risk if random folks at the intercom buzzed me up trying to get in.
Or 2) plays audio "enter passcode", then:
- if the visitor enters the code that I told them, it plays DTMF 9 to let them in
- if the code is incorrect, plays "incorrect passcode" and hangs up
It also sends an email and SMS whenever someone triggers the intercom so I know about it. With passcodes, I can even set up multiple passcodes to give out to various people (like Amazon, friends) and my notification will display which code was used.
Personally, I’m of the opinion that this kind of thing should be done by those who understand the risks and accept them regardless. It’s fun and interesting, and in the real world it will almost certainly never be an issue.
I'd be fine installing this in my own house, but it shouldn't go in a shared space.
in fact, I've done something similar, wiring my unifi door bell to be able to unlock my matter-enabled deadbolt via an esp32 in the wall.
* Given access to more people or other ways.
* Bypassed any logging that might be used during crime investigation.
* May have increased the likelihood of the system failing.
* (more theoretical) Increased the attack surface, and invited more crimes of digital opportunity.
So they may be partly or wholly responsible for some bad things that happen.
And also may be held responsible by others, with criminal and civil liability.
> [...] so if you’re in the same position as Frank, give it a try!
Don't, if you're in the same position (i.e., sneakily doing it to landlord's access control box, which is relied upon by multiple other neighbors).
But if you're in some different position -- such as it's your own property, and there's some kind of informed consent of all legitimate parties affected -- then kludging the system, by splicing a solenoid wire, might be good and appropriate.
Anyone can get into a complex by following someone else in.
Or, in this case, just power the solenoid wire that is _already outside_ as the OP did.
Why aren’t there more ‘semi dumb’ Ethernet or wifi products that just let you announce that dinner is ready? It doesn’t need to be a fully ruggedised commercial system like this one or a fully integrated cloud managed solution like ring.
The cheap no name wireless ones can’t handle comms between rooms, let alone across a house.
The security implications aren’t insurmountable - you could use pairing codes if there are multiple on the network.
I’ve accepted that it’s a niche market, and that the only solution is to use Asterix with a some cheapo voip phones.
To be honest, I'm honestly sick of Google Home's approach to this since the Gemini update has turned everything really slow and I'm getting close to the point where I'd rather home-roll a full system myself that works reliably instead of the crapshoot that this is. Home Assistant seems to have a functionality bridge to Google Home connected devices like my blinds or cameras so I should be able to retain the edge devices but I have half a mind to just dump the whole thing and start over.
Setting timers works well though
I'd love to know the % of Alexa Dots (whatever the small ones are called now) that are used for anything more than this.
Maybe I'm just not creative enough, but I don't see anything else I would want it to do.
This is Siri’s primary use case, at least I assume so based on my experience.
As long as the timer isn’t for 50 minutes.
I guess my age is showing, but isn't it just a mono speaker? so much is lost in music without stereo imaging. it's one of the main eyebrow raising things to me about most bluetooth portable speakers. If you're mainly listening to podcasts or playing lullabyes to a kids room, sure, but we're adults here and personally I like listening to stereo way to much for these to be an option.
To respond is similarly cumbersome and soon you give up completely. I can only assume it was designed by someone whose parents were killed in an intercom-related disaster and has sworn revenge.
I bought a mini for my office with this purpose in mind, but it has been a total waste.
The first step is getting speakers in a room: there are tons of products that do this, apple, google, Sonos.
Most of them have the audio quality of a bag of instruments.
There are tons of class D amps that you can hook up to speakers: Wiim, acrylic and so on... this will run you anywhere from 100 bucks to 500 and thats before you buy the speakers. Most of these will be great for playing music and projecting your voice.
The moment you involve a TV... well things get ugly because your going to want arc for HDMI and your going to want a center channel cause with out it your likely in subtitle hell half the time. This will get expensive a Sonos sound bar is a few hundred and if you want something better well... Let's say you can get to the point of making a GPU look affordable real quick.
Now that you can play audio, how do you hear it... well your phone works and there are tons of satellites out there.
You're now going to need to run home assistant to "interrupt" what ever is playing (if something is) to play your message and then return what ever it was to its current state.
After trying out WIIM, Acrylic, some high end stereo gear I just settled on half assed audio quality and bought more Sonos gear. I kept a single WIIM unit, cheap amp, decent speakers and a sub around for when I want to really listen to music but other than that I tolerate sonos' middling quality for day to day use (and I am, by no means an audiophile).
Because of 2 reasons
1) this is very antisocial behavior.
2) so many people have a mobile phone at arm's reach a majority of the time so there you have your intercom.
Well educated members of an household would know when dinner is ready because they would actually help make it ready for everyone. Occasionally one teenager could legitimately focus on homework but it is not actually a bad thing that someone has to move its ass and walk upstairs to knock at their door and tell them. We call that free exercise, much cheaper than a fitness subscription.
When I hear about home assistant and domotic in general, the only image that comes to me is those scenes in Wall-E where people live in a flying armchair with a holo screen in front of their face 24/7, their only interaction with a physical world being to only move their arms once in a while to grab a soda.
When I was a kid I remember a house we rented for a while came with intercom using the electrical lines. Past the initial novelty, they mostly collected dust and ended up being unplugged.
I’m genuinely confused why you would think that.
> Well educated members of an household would know when dinner is ready because they would actually help make it ready for everyone.
This is one of the most obnoxious things I have read all year.
And then people will complain that children these days spend their time in front of a screen...
I think @prmoustache is also referring to manners in general.
A) scramble around the entire house going "dinner in 5 minutes"
B) yell the same, hope people hear it, and negatively affect your mood
C) have some sort of system that lets everyone know with the tap of a button.
Additionally, cooking in group is a great moment to have a conversation, much more than the actual dinner where everybody is chewing.
The trope is mom tells the kid to tell dad dinner's ready, and kid just yells really loud to dad, while mom looks on with exasperation. Or was that just my childhood?
I guess so, I wouldn't have done that as a kid, nor do my own kids do that or they would quickly lose privileges.
And the delegation approach defeats the entire purpose of the fore-warning, which is to allow people to wrap up whatever they were doing, out of respect for their time.
There is a limit where having more people won't really help but if one needs to peel some vegetables, press garlic, cut other vegetables, prep and season some meat, clean necessary hardwares and surfaces, one person will never be faster alone with only 2 hands available.
Besides it is not only a fun group activity but a good teaching moment as well for kids / teenagers, especially if you want them to develop healthy and cost effective habits instead relying on buying preprocessed food most of their life.
> out of respect for their time.
What kind of castle do your typical family live that it takes hours to reach to other people? We are talking seconds literally even if you have to reach someone in the barn at the extreme end of a typical garden. I am not talking about the royalty here.
[0] https://doorman.azon.ai/ [1] https://doorman.azon.ai/guide/features/ring-to-open
Edit: undergrad shenanigans from ten years ago:
Our university student-run electronics lab had an issue: technically anyone with a student card was allowed on premises at any given time, but the department only gave us a small set of keys that we had to share with the rest of the student associations. Obviously we needed a solution.
We did some snooping and found that the request-to-exit button wire was running on a cable tray alongside all the other wiring and plumbing, as the lab was in the basement. We picked a suitably dark, inconspicuous spot and wired up a Raspberry Pi driving a transistor and in turn a relay which we then wired in parallel with that button. Users could then connect to the local lab wifi and then SSH into the device. Login shell was replaced with a script that pulsed the GPIO line for half a second and subsequently caused the door to open.
We never got caught and apparently all the evidence was destroyed when the building was renovated a few years later.
Lmao people already getting mad. It's honestly just way simpler doing something like that with a microcontroller/realtime rather than a pi running all sorts of processes/reboots/sd card issues etc.
Sometimes you just use what you have.
But for people to react negatively to my comment in the first place is hilarious and predictable human behaviour. Honestly it doesn't really necessitate explanation, imo.
I'm tempted to have a remote controlled screw driver that can twist the knob remotely or something.
My mum's neighbours buy milk and bread and turn the heating on! I don't quite trust my own neighbour to do that but it's awesome for her
In my case the cabin is actually in the town where I grew up, and used as a way to be closer to home and family without overstaying my welcome and also be a bit more free when here (heh). So I do have family that now helps with this, it was mostly in a "can I pay a little not inconvenience them". I arrived here sunday with the heat on and some easter eggs and bunnies on the table put there by my mother, so it's not all bad. :)
Absolutely!
> I arrived here sunday with the heat on and some easter eggs and bunnies on the table put there by my mother, so it's not all bad. :)
Awww! That's very nice of your Mum! :)
But there absolutely are options to record such Signals and then replicate them via home assistant - I used them before to control a ceiling fan and various infrared devices (same idea, but not a radio there instead a "blaster" - I think it was called)
I didn't set it up again after my last move though, as I couldn't mount the ceiling fan in this apartment and the Infrared devices were just my media center (tv, audio), which are hardly in use currently
They're almost always incredibly simple at the furnace/boiler - you just need to make sure that you never turn the heat on without the pump/blower or whatever is required.
My complicated Eco controller ends up with three outputs: blower on, heat on, cooling on. Three wires.
edit: although mine was an ancient system from the early 90s. It was just replaced with a modern system a couple months ago. At my previous apartment I had wanted to set up a system that would allow either my then partner or I to activate the callbox and have it set for a VOIP number since we could only put one number on the box.
> I bought the cheapest compatible BTicino intercom device (BT 344232 for 32 €) that I could find on eBay, then soldered in 4 wires and added microcontrollers to make it smart. It now connects to my Nuki Opener Smart Intercom IOT device, and to my local MQTT Pub/Sub bus (why not?).
Here’s hoping nobody decides to bother them about this. I’m not a lawyer but this appears to this layperson at the very least a CFAA violation by accessing the router and resetting its root password, as well as possibly criminal mischief as well as whatever stealing AC power is.
You couldn’t pay me to do a writeup like this, and I’d be wearing gloves the whole time.
I was hoping they'd mention something about the legality (or lack thereof), but I guess that's an exercise left to the reader who wants to try this out at their own apartment.
For repairing a broken thing? After provably trying in vain to get the landlord to fix it?
And it's definitely possible to get in trouble for "fixing" something if you're not authorized to fix it.
I would call this "bypassing building controls to allow unauthorized access to the building." Frank has access to the building through the allowed means per his lease, not through any means. If his lease is like mine there's a whole page to initial about being granted access through the gates or pool or whatever with only the complex-assigned keys and RFID tags.
(I presume Frank lives in the US, and his state's tenancy laws similar to mine apply.)
Down the hallway from my office used to be the management of a small hotel chain. We often had lunch together and I got to hear a bunch of interesting anecdotes over the years.
Way back when they started up and didn't yet have enough cash to actually own the buildings they operated in, they rented. One of the buildings turned out to have numerous issues (holes in the roof, gaps near exterior walls, etc...). To the point that they eventually didn't pass a fire inspection. They repeatedly asked the owner to have it fixed. Pressed for time, they themselves eventually payed someone, out of their own pocket, so it would at least be up to code for the fire inspection.
From what I was told, the owner threw a tantrum over them modifying the building, terminated the contract and sued them. Successfully.
If you are a tenant in a rental apartment, you'd probably have more leniency on the legal side (compared to a company renting a business property). But still, I'd be very careful making any assumptions about the legal situation rather than risking some sort of Kafkaesque legal mess.
Over here at least, it is very common in apartment complexes that the apartment owner is a different person/entity than the building owner and only the later has the rights to mess with stuff installed in the walls (e.g. plumbing) and especially stuff elsewhere in the building (e.g. an external intercom system). If you ask the landlord to fix it, the best they could do is forward that request to the building owner. If you pulled a stunt like the OP did, there's a good chance that the building owner will sue your landlord.
Was the unauthorized modification permanent or undoable? If the latter, I think some people should really get their judge card (or landlord card) revoked.
Did the judge at least suggest what alternative action the tenant should have taken to comply with the law and code?
Whether or not it's worth all the trouble and time is a different matter. For most people, I'd say reporting to relevant authorities to make the landlord's life harder without needing much continuing effort is probably worth doing, but the lawsuit side is likely to be a huge time and money sink and it's almost always easier to just move. Let the city sue them for continuing to accrue complaints of unsafe living conditions.
In the same way, a landlord cannot evict you themself if you just fail to pay rent, but there are multiple legal mechanisms to eventually get the sheriff to do it for them. Basically, if landlord-tenant negotiation fails, I think the only legal recourse is to involve governmental third parties unless you technically open yourself up to legal reprisal.
I don't know if this would apply to a commercial tenant.
But it would definitely not apply to non-violating conditions like the OP's case.
The last apartment I rented (London) I never even met my shitty landlord hiding all the way up in Scotland. Randomly one day after getting home from a long day at work, my fob wouldn't let me in at the front door. Message the landlord ("SMS only, no calls") and it turns out that he'd got another copy made in case he needed it - when he got this copy made, the security company disabled the current fob (my one).
Initially he was going to make me wait until a new fob could be sorted out. After much anger and aggression I got his fob sent down to me in the post. Was still not able to access my home for several days and had to emergency crash with some friends.
Didn't get a discount on the rent and the fucker came up with every excuse under the sun to take my security deposit upon moving out as well.
BS.
Anecdotally, I've had a relay fail on when I inadvertently pulled more amps through it than it was rated for, so it's definitely possible.
A useful device to know about is the Relay In A Box line.[2] This is exactly what it says - a relay in a box, for when you need to switch power with a low-voltage control signal. UL and CE approvals, fits standard electrical conduit fittings, and will pass code inspection. Rated for 10 million cycles. Boring, but useful.
[1] https://www.alldatasheet.com/html-pdf/1132639/SONGLERELAY/SR...
[2] https://www.functionaldevices.com/category/building-automati...
Those Doorkings have had to get replaced at so many buildings in Seattle now that criminals figured out how easy they were to override.
That aside, I enjoyed this read and it's such a niche thing that there is almost no way they'll step on the toes of another resident wanting to do the same thing
We have seen similar trade-offs working on binary encoding for our alerting systems; even a few hundred bytes difference per message changes what's feasible over BLE or LoRa. What protocol the intercom uses natively and how much of the HomeKit overhead is format vs transport?
I love the future so far.
No native apple home - homebridge handles that.
Here is the installation documentation I have the 4-wire system. I installed it using Cat-5 and standard 548B wiring layout. The rest of the electronic door locks uses the Identiv Liberty key fob system. This was the only system I could find that allowed self-hosting.
I wouldn't mind another layer of integration that would add smartphone access control. The way the 2 systems are currently deployed I could ignore the TekTone side and just integrate the key fobs with the smartphones. I think this might already be possible be possible as the key fob readers already react to the NFC radios on my smartphone.
https://www.tektone.com/pdf_files/manuals/IL826_PK543A_insta...
I only had one key to the main door, which was annoying when I had guests who were staying a few days. It finally got annoying enough once I had a steady girlfriend who was more or less unofficially living with me. So I opened up the handset base, figured out the voltage on the wire for opening the door, and got a Raspberry Pi and a relay rated for the voltage I needed. I connected the relay's control pin to a GPIO on the Pi, and wrote a little python HTTP server that would enable the GPIO pin, and fire off a thread to turn it back off after a few seconds.
I was working at Twilio at the time, so I figured the easiest trigger would be SMS. I set up a phone number, and the backend logic for it had a list of sender phone numbers and 6-digit codes. That way I could only allow certain people's phones to trigger, and on top of that, it required a code, unique to each visitor I was allowing. It would also send a text to me every time someone used it, so I could monitor things to ensure nothing odd was happening.
I already had a small home automation system running using openHAB, with remote access set up on a VPS I rented, so it wasn't hard to hook all that together, in a way that the callback handler from Twilio could reach back into the home.
I didn't have a great way to mount it, and didn't want to mess up the wall. The Pi and relay were light enough that I ended up just hanging it from the wires connecting to from the relay to the handset base. Fortunately there was an electrical socket almost directly below the handset so I could plug in the Pi. (I forgot about it when my landlady had to come over due to a water leak; surprisingly she didn't even comment on it.)
My one worry was that the little python HTTP server would crash between closing the relay and then opening it up again after a few seconds, leaving the door persistently unlocked. But I used a default-open port on the relay, so if power went out, the relay would stay open, keeping the door locked. I also made sure that the little HTTP server would reset the GPIO to keep the relay open on startup, so if it crashed and restarted, it would ensure the door was locked. IIRC there was also something you could put in the Pi's /boot/config.txt to set GPIOs to a certain value on boot(?). And on top of that, I wrote another little python script that just sat there checking the GPIO every second, and if it remained on for more than a few seconds, it would close it. This was probably overkill, but I wanted to be as sure as possible I wouldn't be putting my neighbors into any kind of danger by perma-unlocking the front door.
Something like an ESP32 would certainly have been smaller and lower-power (maybe could have even run it off battery), but at the time I hadn't even heard of ESP32 yet (that would come a few years later, when I was bored during the pandemic and needed a project).