It takes 5 cloud services to hear my doorbell
blog.vghaisas.com
blog.vghaisas.com
Edit: there are very, very few products on the market designed as simply as this, just an R/F signal triggering local playback. I think the only commercial doorbells designed like this I found were an out-of-stock product, and a UK device designed for 230V that would have required a bulky adapter to work for me in the US.
You could have bought a bell...
No because similar commercial products were either out of stock or not compatible with my AC voltage.
Over engineering is about the solution, not the requirement:
> I wanted something that lets me play a custom bell
Granted maybe your requirements are ridiculous. But I also had cases where I DIYed a solution because the commercially available solutions all either didn't fulfil the requirements and/or had anti-features that ruled out their use. I haven't had any regret so far with these solutions, with some of these being active for over a decade.
There may be over engineering, but replacing a bought solution that needs to connect to the internet and someone else's computer to ring a bell with a simple 433MHz sender and a MP4-player module isn't that. Do you know what is required for a device to even connect to a WiFi? That alone is more complex than the whole system the user built here.
so what?
Simple systems have the advantage that there are less moving parts. Less moving parts means less chance of failure. That is a trade-off an engineer will sometimes take even if it means building a new thing, sometimes something with more moving parts is needed and that is okay as well.
Maybe your requirement is to have a doorbell that does work when the internet is out. Who knows? OP might live in a place where this happens more often. Or they might not and like the idea to never again have to think about their doorbell-manufacturers cloud and the latests exploits targeting that IoT product. There are many reasons why simple can be the right choice and any true engineer would say: "depends" instead of "so what".
You are correct in general, but I think "so what?" was an adequate response (even though I don't agree with it) in this case that actually furthered the discussion as can be seen from your long reply.
We don't always need LLM-like, long comments. Sometimes "so what?" can be intriguing enough.
But my implementation of these requirements is absolutely not over engineered. I argue it is the simplest and most reliable it could be done.
If it quacks like a duck, doesn’t matter what you call it: it was over engineering.
I challenge you to design a wireless doorbell that has a user-configurable chime, in a way that uses less software or less hardware than mine. You couldn't.
In fact, if you did market research like me you would find that 99% of similar products have vastly more complex hardware or software or services being them. They break when there is no Internet. Some work without Internet but don't work when the local Wi-Fi is non functional. They don't immediately get back online after a power outage. They need regular software updates during which the chime can't play. These are over engineered things. Not my product, because mine has none of this complexity or faults.
If the requirements and constraints come from you, then saying "those are the requirements" doesn't settle anything. And is the same excuse people use for the over-engineered solutions you don't seem to like.
It is over-engineering compared to a regular doorbell, period.
Maybe “I want a configurable chime” is just a less popular requirement than “I want to be notified on my phone even if I'm not at home.”
Also, Excel is famously complex because, despite most users only using 20% of the features, no one uses the same 20%, so if you want cover close to 100% of the market, you need to ship features that are useless to most of your users.
Precisely.
The Wi-Fi and Linux solution that was called over-engineered just happened to have different requirements. Engineering is a collaboration, not blindly solving very specific problems.
I think you're comparing 2 very different scenarios here.
Excel is solution engineered to meet every requirement under the sun, for every possible user.
"The doorbell" is something designed and built by 1 person to meet exactly their own requirements.
whstl (the other commenter) insists that he is better suited than the benefiter and builder of that doorbell to decide what is a good requirement and he's willing to make tasteless jokes comparing anyone who doesn't agree with his assessments to Nazis on trial at Nurnberg [1]. You'll notice that whstl didn't even ask why the requirement exists in the first place, just concluded it's wrong (it's something they teach you on day 1 of engineering school, build whatever you want, better if you don't ask questions where the answer might inconvenience you).
When you have a requirement would you take the word of someone on the internet just saying it's not a valid one?
Nothing wrong with that.
Also nothing wrong with people going to great lengths to build an Excel replacement that fits their exact requirements like glove, by ignoring 99.9% of what makes Excel … excel.
The issue is calling Excel over engineered for catering to everyone else:
> You would be surprised that 99% of the solutions out there are complete over engineered stacks that depend on wifi devices, Internet access, connecting to various cloud services...
Even if all some people wanted was a custom sound on their doorbells, I bet many of those people will want to transfer the sound using a smartphone rather than an SD card they can't modify with a computer many don't own. And, given that capability, even more people will want to be notified of a ring on their phones, and then why not when they're outside (maybe on the backyard) away from the LAN, and then why not while they're at work, and so on and so forth.
The “over engineered” solutions are actually engineered to cater to everyone else, that is all.
And to make whstl's point: I find it much easier to justify internet and cloud to support a doorbell that's genuinely more useful (rings remotely) than SD cards and custom hardware to justify something as … frivolous as changing the bell's sound.
PS: I just spent $70 modding a $20 Casio watch. I loved every second of it.
Is a coffee machine with 1000 parts over engineered? For home use yes. For use on the ISS probably not. Context is important, take something out of context and you’ll confidently give the wrong answer.
Anything can be considered over engineered if we just ignore the requirements of the user/builder. Copy from phone? Over engineered with wireless. Copy over SD? Over engineered with a controller. Have a door bell at all? Over engineered with wires.
Start with the goal of the device. Do you want a doorbell with a ring you can choose? SD is probably a lower complexity choice and can’t really go much lower. Do you want a doorbell with internet? Add basic internet connectivity. Unless you do it in a convoluted fashion, with more parts and complexity than needed to achieve that, it's not over engineering.
> And to make whstl's point: I find it much easier to justify internet
I read the opposite. whstl made 2 points for as long as I could be bothered to read his comments: that engineers who implement all the requirements are like Nazi soldiers committing genocide, and that additional features on a doorbell amount to over engineering which is exactly the opposite of what you say.
If you don't need internet, why add it just on a "might as well" basis? The feature creep can go on forever like that. Add a 2-way intercom, video camera with IR and floodlight, some AI recognition stuff, local and cloud backed storage, etc. Now you also created a headache to maintain the software or guarantee it will be in a botnet soon.
Always start with what you need, what’s the goal of the device, and how can you implement that in the most reasonably straight forward fashion as possible. Just so you don’t end up with a doorbell that runs Vmware because "why not".
I can't be sure about whstl, but that's my only point.
And, really, nothing against going to great expense/effort to build exactly what one wants. In fact, I love doing just that.
You don't provide that.
What I am stating is that "it was in the requirements" is not a "get out of jail card" when someone says it's over-engineered.
All I'm saying is that it's a very comfortable position to abstract away personal responsibility and say "I'm not over-engineering, that's what X wants", but that's exactly how we get the over-engineered Linux-plus-wi-fi doorbells.
I'm perfectly fine with people having fun or over-engineering stuff, I'm just pointing out that it's still over-engineered in the end. Which is 100% fine!
Over-engineered simply means there is much more in that implementation than the baseline needed to tick off the requirements.
As an engineer (the traditional kind), I don't really appreciate nor can I afford the "not my problem" attitude of doing engineering in a vacuum, because in the end it's my responsibility.
Isn't everybody? Your whole case rests on the insistence that OP's core requirement is no good. Not for any objective engineering reasons, just because you think so.
I have a simple question that any engineer can answer in a heartbeat. Is a Christmas tree light installation with a bunch of series connected incandescent lights (I'm talking literally one of those classic Christmas lights set with absolutely no extra components or complexity beyond wires, bulbs, and plug) over engineered? Could you do it with even less engineering?
I never said it wasn't good.
I just said it led to over-engineering a doorbell.
"Good" or "bad" are words you're putting in my mouth.
I was trying to be diplomatic and use "good/bad" as shorthand for "should be part of a well engineered (not over/under) product or not". You don't like it, then let me use what you actually said: engineers who implement all the requirements given to them are like the Nazi soldiers who executed the people they were ordered to execute. Neither good nor bad, just over executing, right?
I asked you a question because it was an easy way to apply your logic on something concrete, so you can see that if it fails on something so simple, maybe it's not actually useful at all. You pretended not to see it like a fine engineer with responsibilities. Tripped on a Christmas light.
My whole point is that "something being in the requirements" is not a shield against something being considered "over engineering" by others. There's nothing more to it.
And I said exactly the opposite of that.
Doing bad things is bad, despite following orders.
Over-engineering is over-engineering, despite following requirements.
How do you define objectively as an engineer if "play MP3" is too much? A doorbell is a sound outputting device only, being able to select the sound seems like a reasonable extension. Is a digital doorbell overengineered when analog electric ones worked just fine for almost 2 centuries? Or were these overengineered when mechanical doorbells worked for many more centuries before? What if I attach a light to the doorbell, is that over engineering?
Or are you just fighting to save face after missing the point completely and making that tasteless Nurnberg trial parallel?
Then I want you to justify why commercial products offering this feature have 10-100 times more code or 10 times more complex hardware just to do what my doorbell does :-)
The person who gave an opinion about whether this is overengineered or not was Lukeify, not me:
> You are super-sensitive to over-engineering, so you over-engineered your requirements and ultimately your end product, just in a different methodology and framework.
It's still over-engineering to a lot of people, including lukeify, regardless of there existing something worse, regardless of any "it was the requirements" defence.
Over-engineering something is fine. Especially a personal project.
Just own it.
What if the default chime triggers some PTSD? (Probably doesn’t, but it could happen!) What if the landlord doesn’t want you to drill a hole through the side of your house and it doesn’t come with a doorbell?
The solution isn’t “over engineered” it’s just “engineered” (not an off the shelf product)
I never said otherwise?
Perhaps it was unproductive because you’re assuming I’m making a point while I’m not?
My point was entirely that other people can call this “over engineered” due to feature creep.
The person who called it over engineered in the first place wasn’t me.
I appreciate that you and other people seem to want to discuss doorbells, and someone else seems to want to discuss christmas lights, but I am not really interested in that.
I am arguing a general point (“feature creep can lead to overengineering”), not this specific product.
Regardless, this is irrelevant to the point of this entire thread, which is that it's possible to design a device, as I did, that is vastly simpler than commercial doorbells allowing user-customizable chimes.
Here, someone else explained. Maybe you can understand better if it comes from someone else: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49508403
> check out my hand-embroidered curtains, it's got exactly the flower pattern I wanted
> yeah well you shouldn't want flowers on your curtains, just buy plain white ones from the store
I'm just pointing out that "it's in the [my own] requirements" in this case does not really make something "not over engineered".
Also opinions will change after time, or after analyzing the problem space better.
GP also said that lots of product in the market are over-engineered, so I don't see why my view (that this is an over-engineered doorbell) is controversial at all.
The former definition is somewhat objective in that it can be tested and proven, while the latter definition is entirely subjective and sort of meaningless. I could just as well state that any doorbell is over-engineered since you can just knock.
> GP: The minimum of 5+x^2 is closer to 5.5 than 10
> You: If you were minimizing 3+x^2 you could get an even lower value
I am saying that people can call something "overengineered" and "it was the requirement" is not a defence.
Maybe what I mean is: Feature creep does contribute to overengineering. That's not controversial in the engineering community at all.
> I am saying that people can call something "overengineered" and "it was the requirement" is not a defence.
Okay, so you're not saying to reject all above-minimum features, but then there seems to be no objective criteria, so who is deciding which ones to reject? Why is it not the customer?
And it's not a does-nothing feature either, it has a meaningful impact on the user.
> Maybe what I mean is: Feature creep does contribute to overengineering. That's not controversial in the engineering community at all.
A requirement from the start, the baseline of the product pitch, is the opposite of feature creep.
But it helps to have somewhat objective criteria, like whether it was feature creep. And this was not feature creep. And custom sound for something like this is a desirable feature for the average person; you can look at the massive ringtone business in the 00s to prove that.
> And custom sound for something like this is a desirable feature for the average person; you can look at the massive ringtone business in the 00s to prove that.
And every AI startup should send a monthly Tulip to every user. The Tulip craze of the 1630s proves that.
People like to customize sounds. Lots and lots of people.
> It is also the right of anyone to call something feature creep, using their own criteria.
I was listening to your potential argument for "over-engineered", but "feature creep" is pretty objective. This was not feature creep. OP wanted a specific feature from the start and even went out of their way to exclude lots of features.
Tulips?
> I was listening to your potential argument for "over-engineered"
It wasn't me who made such argument.
Since you brought up tulips, you should know very well they were not paying small amounts and the problems all came from people that were not directly enjoying them. Your analogy between them and ringtone enjoyers is hopelessly broken.
> It wasn't me who made such argument.
First off, you did. You said "If it quacks like a duck, doesn’t matter what you call it: it was over engineering." and as a followup you said "Challenge accepted: "Similar functionality" here is the same doorbells that have existed for over a century. Done. :)". You started off actually participating in the discussion about whether the doorbell was over-engineered, and only later started trying to be so abstract and unfalsifiable.
Second off, even if you hadn't written those comments and you had actually made yourself impartial about the doorbell itself, I would still say the same thing to you. Read this again: I was listening to your potential argument for "over-engineered", but "feature creep" is pretty objective. This was not feature creep. OP wanted a specific feature from the start and even went out of their way to exclude lots of features.
My comment there doesn't even say you were calling it over-engineering. It says you were making arguments about it, which you were. You were defending the people calling things over-engineering by bringing up feature creep. So I pointed out feature creep is even weaker and doesn't apply here.
Anyway, I could maybe think you honestly thought the second half of my post didn't apply to you. But your "Tulips?" response to the first half makes it clear you're being disingenuous and dodging. Prove me wrong? But I'm not holding my breath.
I don’t care about doorbells or Tulips.
But it should be considered fair to say that some things are over-engineered in relation to others.
It should also be considered ok to call things over-engineered. OP himself did.
Once you start that, you also need to stop somewhere. For example, we could even question the need for a door in the first place. Not saying that we should, but if you want to take over defining other people's requirements, you're putting this on yourself.
So if you don't want somebody else to call you out for over engineering somebody else's requirements, where do you stop?
It's not an enviable position to be in. :)
Some other people mentioned the doorbell project was over-engineering and I just agreed with them.
So I don't agree that you can call mrb's basic wireless doorbell "overengineered" for requirements reasons alone without opening yourself up to the same scrutiny that you're applying to him.
Then we are in agreement!
The person who originally called it "overengineered" wasn't me, it was another user.
I did joke that an electric doorbel "does a similar job" but that was to demonstrate that "similar" is also a judgement call.
I am just saying that lukeify or anyone can call it overengineered from their point of view, similar to how GP called commercial products overengineered.
You point that out without providing any context or criteria. So you're just pointing out your personal opinion, nothing resembling fact. In this case everything is over engineered. The doorbell is overengineered before even discussing mp3.
But... why?
My light switches are similarly complicated.
As for availability, they are certainly very obtainable where I am in UK. Shops and Amazon etc have them.
I know a guy who lives is a 1700's-era house. His is a bell, a pulley, and a string.
The problem is they've probably gone to the wrong house before and met an owner who got defensive.
Then I guess 3d print a casing that just puts the ZigBee button on top of the integrated button?
But honestly, even if you have nothing, if you know a bit what you are doing with IoT with HomeAssistant if you buy the right hardware (i.e. verified as working by others, e.g. the Sonoff ones typically) it's at most an afternoon of tinkering for a setup that will reliably work for years.
Now we're in "under-engineering" territory. Also not good.
Interesting context you live in. Here in east europe, 90% of devices you find on eshops are cheap chinese buttons with AAA batteries, that emit signal and another reciever device that plays sound. The sound is not customizable, but it is super cheap stuff.
I would have to go out of my way, to find cloud connected doorbell.
This is EXACTLY the problem! Try finding one that I can customize with my own chime and you will only find expensive, unreliable, over engineered stuff.
Or buy 5, and decide which tone you like most.
- All consumers own smartphones and like using them
- Consumers have no idea how their home networking works
- Consumers could not move a file from their computer to an SD card (or something similar)
So, everything is done by the app: you install the app, the smart device broadcasts a wifi network. This allows you to use your phone to give the smart device your wifi password. Then the remote servers handle everything else.
There's nothing in between. You're either an actual engineer, as mrb describes, or you're just beholden to cloud services that are terrible and also are guaranteed to disappear in 0-3 years.
Also, a doorbell ringing on the outside of the door is not only silly but in case of an apartment complex highly annoying for your neighbors.
And make sure your neighbors like being monitored through your five services.
Personally I have a button outside my front door. It is connected with a copper wire to the other side of the door to a small device that sends out an audible notification. No cloud required.
Then you don’t need 5 cloud services and people can go back to knocking.
Same thing as DVR for analog surveillance cameras, just with eth (usually PoE) ports.
There's no shortage of footage of people casing a place spotting the camera then wondering away. The smart ones look like they're any other lost delivery driver complete with package in hand. Thanks to the rise of gig work nobody has uniforms anymore. No that it really matters, plenty of stolen uniforms in play too.
One type didn't care about any security system, even alarms. They would smash and grab as fast as they could and get out. They didn't have a plan other than to grab the first things that looked valuable. It might cost more to fix the building than to replace what they found.
The other type was trying to play it smart. As soon as they noticed the cameras or indications of a security system they'd leave. Lots of videos where a person was detected, looks up at the cameras, and then slips away to go find another house.
A lot of people start turning off alerts or never set them up properly, so they don't notice the second type of video unless they go looking.
Unfortunately for them, they had both of their kids' names tattooed to their neck, which helped reduce the number of possible suspects.
Wild watching back that footage the next morning.
You can get more information, including a free home audit, at https://polbru.be/prevention-contre-le-vol/?lang=fr in French and https://polbru.be/diefstalpreventie/ in Dutch, sorry no English links.
My favorite burglar fact is robberies go way down when it’s raining. Thieves just don’t want the hassle of getting wet.
Seem silly, but just try going to the police with crisp hi-res video of a burglarly and try to get them interested. I know people who have done it and all have failed. "We don't have time for this", "Value is not high enough to pursue", "Just call your insurance, not us".
The other way round: If the son the mayor commits armed burglary, nothing happens. Happened in Amsterdam. According to her, her son was just messing around with friends.
https://nltimes.nl/2019/08/14/amsterdam-mayor-explains-15-yo...
You also don't have to be extremely bright to realise that a home with a fancy security system may be a higher-value target than the one without.
Burglars know they’ll probably be on CCTV somewhere anyway but nobody in their right mind is trying to smash through a security door or saw through some window bars when there’s a house up the street that doesn’t have them.
Obviously there are downsides (cost, aesthetics) but those solutions actually work, I’m skeptical that a fancy subscription doorbell makes much difference
I've lived in a couple of countries where everyone has bars on all their windows due to perceived (in some case correctly, in other cases not) crime levels. It's... not great? I'd much rather live somewhere where I don't need to live in a prison compound.
Yeah, that's fair. I do prefer living somewhere that requires neither.
People have been stealing things from stores which have had cctv for decades. Your premises are manifestly false.
Just because something doesn’t work 100% of the time doesn’t mean it can’t be effective.
CCTV doesn't work well when people feel like nobody is going to bother to check its footage (e.g. pocketing a $2 drink from a big-box department store). But when it comes to homes, there are much higher chances of captured footage being used and examined, so it may cause opportunistic burglars to look at other houses instead.
Someone's private property getting trespassed/burgled will have a much higher chance of resulting in legal consequences.
Cameras deter crime. Not ALL crime. Criminals aren’t stupid and will simply go burgle someone that isn’t recording.
So now your front camera has somebody with an unidentifiable hoodie knocking and your back camera has somebody with an unidentifiable hoodie kick in the backdoor. How did the camera help exactly? Is the police really going to find somebody with this almost-invisible stain of dirt on the sleeve of the hoodie? Or are they rather going to say "oh well we'll keep an eye out" and that's the last you hear? My experience is the latter. Now you lost the worth of what they took plus all the money spent on your camera gear and the time setting it up.
Or are you saying doesn't matter, the deterrent is enough? Well then put up a fake camera for a fraction of the price. Works offline too.
The crime there (shoplifting) doesn't begin until they leave.
In the case of a burglary, the crime begins when they enter.
Seems to be a pretty important distinction when discussing whether knowing a person is physically present on your property alerts you to a crime in progress.
“If I say I’ll do something I’ll do it. There’s no need to remind me every six months”
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=mädels+wenn+ein+mann+sagt+e...
With a video doorbell you can get notifications when a person enters your property. You can notify police or neighbors if it’s a stranger
If they are going through the trouble its because they know there is something of value in there and a camera is not going to stop them.
A camera is only going to dissuade crimes of opportunity, its basically just fancy lock.
False, opportunity theft is the most common form.
Better doors/windows/locks help the most, and help against both opportunistic and targeted.
the only robberies that get 'attribution' are cases where the criminals get caught. i.e. low hanging fruit and thus these statistics skew to opportunistic events.
however, unplanned opportunistic crime makes for good promotional sales of window bars and strong locks. just like safes with electronic keypads.
very few such devices will stop a premeditated theft... and what is the rate of recovery for stolen goods in most jurisdictions?
Around here, they wear hoodies and keep their hood up to obscure their face.
Wear a mask and the victim is home: they know you are about to rob them and can prepare. Run away before the police come
Don't wear a mask and victim is home: make up a fake reason you pressed the doorbell, or up the ante to a home invasion and risk getting shot.
Don't wear a mask and the victim is not home: proceed with burglary but face is recorded for police.
Wear a mask and victim is not home: profit.
It's not as simple as covering up. Plus you still risk leaving finger prints and DNA
Add to this the security and downtime risks, and the equation really doesn't look good. Equipment that is tied to someone else's cloud is an astonishingly bad idea, but everyone has their own immediate (or even long-term) reasons for ignoring advice. "You get what you deserve."
I couldn't find a front door camera I liked so I ended up building my own from parts.
Having worked for "the cloud" for years, I tell everyone I know, there is no cloud, there is only other people's hard drives.
We live in a bubble. Reading stuff here means you understand things about computing barely 0.1% of the world population understands the possible consequences. Of that 0.1%, plenty do understand the consequences and still choose the convenience.
For these companies, they just need to convince everyone else, for whom they have no possible conception, understanding, or even words to imagine the Orwellian Rube-Goldberg-like machine that is modern day SaaS.
It isn't so much "get what you deserve", so much as society writ large is getting what it deserves for unregulated advertising slop and re-sale of consumer data.
My next plan is to do a doorbell. I want it fully local only and I know there are providers who offer this brand new for $$$ but I love the idea of picking up cheap IoT devices and hacking them instead. My current candidate is EZVIZ DB1C but I haven’t bought it yet and definitely open to suggestions!
Basically just a wifi button. I hacked one so I could, in my brain fog, record the moment i started and finished feeding my infant by sending a ping to a server via a simple click.
There's a bunch up on eBay. Could probably 3M tape one beside your door. Easy solution, esp if it's shielded from rain.
A zigbee button/doorbell would work well, but then we'd have two buttons on the front door unless we hid the Blink's integrated button somehow.
I guess $30 for what is effectively a glorified chime for your door is a bit much, but considering the time it probably took to put together this (kind of over-engineered) and the (presumably) monthly cost of the VPS, it makes more sense.
Also, I feel like something like MQTT or another message broker could simplify this significantly, making the whole VPS /state endpoint unnecessary, without exposing your home mini pc to the internet, since the mini pc would connect to the MQTT (I think HA actually has a built in mqtt integration? although you'll still need to make something to process the message once the MQTT gets it) and the SmartThings API would also (assuming the processing after the SmartThings API is hit is customizable in some form)
MQTT was an option, but it actually felt like overkill to add an MQTT server on my VPS than just a tiny Express server. (But who am I to talk about overkill here.)
Let it bounce around the globe 3 times through Tor, Iroh, Blockchain, Tailscale, Meshtastic, Thread, Zigbee, Bluetooth, WiFi, IrDA, NFC, TransferJet, FireWire, UART, SPI, I2C, and OneWire, using the free tiers of AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI, IBM Cloud, and Baidu Cloud. And it's 2026, don’t forget a game of telephone powered by free LLMs on OpenRouter.
P.S. Speaking of chimes, I found this page with a bunch of sound samples from a Japanese company. Strangely satisfying: https://qq-bell.com/media/x-plus-64sound
Suggestions welcome!
[1] More precisely, we did until we moved to a manufactured home that did not even have a doorbell installed, after which I had to do some jiggering (now we have a Ring chime that the doorbell can talk to over the house's LAN). But the setup I describe above worked fine for a number of years in the house we were in before.
But yes, there were definitely other ways to solve this problem.
(Yours wasn't a latency issue though, what kind of latency do you get with your 5-cloud services chain?)
Also, interesting about the SmartThings API access moving to a subscription model: https://hackaday.com/2026/07/28/samsungs-smartthings-api-ter... (this link is in the article - the cost is only for third party usage, not if you're directly using the SmartThings app).
Imagine paying a Korean company five bucks a months so you can get a notification on your phone that your fridge needs a new water filter.
People really need to touch grass.
(The actual doorbell button is still there too, so it's a crapshoot which one somebody decides to use in the first place. And yes, many video doorbells have a "chime adapter" to take care of this, but our house's doorbell wiring made them run in fear.)
This is absurdity.
It’s not, that’s called a duct tape solution, which is the opposite of engineering, that’s poor design and bad practice, there are so many failure points and moving parts that it’s eminent it will fail. The engineering design should be reliable, simple, and efficient. Instead of that cluster chaos you made, you could have had a relay wired inside the bell that simultaneously trigger a normal and simple electric-based bell, so it works for you and the other person.
"look at what i can do with the assistance of an LLM"
shows an rube goldberg construction sure it works. but geez support and security is a nightmare.
That said, the author might also consider installing an actual doorbell, which is a device their home should have had decades ago. You'll also want something to provide power to the Nest, so this is almost free.
etc.
What a time to be alive
I told a 10 year old to tie the strings on a hood like he’d tie a shoe (after he just jumbled the strings together in a failed attempt to get them out of the way instead of making any kind of knot). He told me he didn’t know how. I was a bit shocked, since at that age I was learning all kinds of different knots for fun, and the shoelaces seem like gateway into knots.
Use a physically protected motion action video recorder. No web. The burglary will happen and you will have evidence. No software upgrades. Never obsolete.
YMMV
2. Buglary risk reducing when you install a camera is a myth. A very convenient myth though for those selling you any of the components in your over-engineered thing.
My dad had the old Radio Shack plug 'n power stuff when I was a kid and it .. just worked for decades.
Lesson there.
I inherited an electrical one from the previous owner. It ran on... battery. (Why would anyone do this is beyond me, but it turns out to be very common where I live.) The battery died and I needed a replacement. If I wanted to replace it with something that connects to the power cables inside the house, I'd need to drill a hole in the front wall (made of brick and mortar) and find the closest cable to connect to... And I was too lazy to do that.
On the street I live, there are mostly old houses. Some of them have a bell that exposes a handle on the outside that you need to pull in order to ring the bell inside the house. Some have a "door hammer" (is it what it's called?), a decorative, usually shaped as a ring in an animal's mouth, hammer that's attached to the middle of the door one would use to knock on a metal plate used for this attachment.
I bought an actual cast iron bell and attached it near the door above the mailbox.
What happened is that people seem to doubt so much the functionality of an obvious bell that they prefer knocking on the door to pulling the thread attached to the bell. That's what most package delivery service people do.
I like just about everything about the device, but I just want to have a normal door chime again.
Their ancient wolf-dog ancestors howl with approval. That's why we domesticated them after all.
As a recent owner of a Samsung fridge, I'm really curious to know what the plan is here. The probability of me paying a monthly for my refrigerator is exactly zero.
So then I decided to set up some LED strip lights for my office with really nice wireless buttons from IKEA.
I confirmed that the buttons and the lights both were zigbee compatible, but I missed that one supported only Thread and the other only Matter. So now I have two identical antennas, each handling a different protocol.
WRT IKEA, if they’re the Thread-only device, I found one page [0] claiming that some of them can be forced into Zigbee mode.
0: https://automatedhome.com/the-hidden-trick-inside-ikeas-new-...
Is it so difficult to expose a MQTT thing or some other random HTTP server, default off but configurable in some developer settings, that could be used to control the device/read state? It would certainly make the minority that is us power users happy.
Generally ONVIF is the protocol one should be looking for in a camera, it indicates that the edge device can play ball with a central server (Frigate, Blue Iris, etc). Profile M specifies the metadata into external mqtt:
However, those companies don’t make the kind of perpetual revenue that bring in capital, and the companies that make the devices that don’t make you pay for their service end up not lasting as long as those that do.
Sadly, it seems that the prudent business decision is to lock your customers into your ecosystem.
The design is simple and easy to hack (and build something else). There are rather cheap light switches that operate on the same principle and can be used.
Smart appliance: You buy it, it works more or less as expected for 1 year, then it fails in new and exciting ways, and then you replace it with a dumb appliance.
My office is in the other end of the house, and most package delivery service press the doorbell and starts working away instantly. While that's also a bit extreme, I can't expect them to stand around for more than ~30 seconds.
There's a solution to this!
next round of outdoor cams and doorbells are going to be wholly selfhosted.
if they live for another 9 months I'll have the budget for it.
Sounds like a feature more than a bug.
Once you do all that, your spouse comes and asks for a way to control the air conditioning too…
This whole "you need to create an account" is a virus that needs to go away. It should be possible to control a local device without accounts, privacy policies, and other crap.
Up next: How many cloud services does it take to turn on the lights?
Here's a hint: https://imgur.com/a/light-bulb-moment-hIKUI48
But hey, it could be worse. For instance, you could be trying to send an e-mail: https://github.com/0x4447/0x4447_product_s3_email#what-will-...
Now rip it back out again and replace it with a better, local solution.
___
Fwiw, I did buy some dahua thing for this, for which I now run an asterisk that hangs up on every call and switches a USB relay to ring the actual bell.
Equally jank, but locally contained jank.
Today it's never been easier to make custom stuff -- 3dprinting and even PCB manufacturing can be done as a service, no need to buy. Although I would use a dev board microcontroller for $7, so no need for PCB.
And doorbell case also doesn't have to be 3d printed, can make it from wood or metal, if you prefer.
I do find it doubtful that OP couldn’t skip most of their setup, though; if you have HomeAssistant (which they do), and there’s a direct path from Blink -> Alexa, I’m fairly certain HA could then handle triggering the Google Home Mini devices on its own.
Or, you know, doorbell chimes.
Add to that: every manufacturer wants to run their own servers and their own cloud service. I don't want my data strewn throughout the internet. For most devices, there is zero reason they couldn't work entirely within the LAN. Plus, we all know that half of those services will die in a few years, forcing us to replace perfectly good devices.
That is a feature, not a bug.
https://philip.greenspun.com/humor/eecs-difference-explained
I cannot imagine ever thinking that a 3rd party web connected camera running 24/7 in my home would be a good idea.