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Comment by vghaisas | Hacker News Reader

I thought it was finally time to write up the story of my absurd home doorbell implementation, especially because the upcoming Samsung SmartThings API pricing means things will have to change soon.

Suggestions welcome!

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We have a Ring doorbell that hooks into the actual chime that the old doorbell used, so it still preserves the old doorbell's functionality[1]. I can understand not wanting to buy into the Ring ecosystem (we started using them before they were bought by Amazon), but maybe there are cheaper doorbells that also do that? All we had to do to make the old chime work with the Ring doorbell was install an extra widget that came with the Ring doorbell inside the chime; the Ring doorbell's instructions explained how to do it. It just needed a screwdriver and a few minutes' work.

[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.

Oh our London flat has no pre-installed doorbell at all! This is surprisingly common and everyone just knocks.

But yes, there were definitely other ways to solve this problem.

I have a similar problem, except I needed to ring the actual doorbell. Currently I'm using a HomeKit-compatible video doorbell that communicates over proprietary radio to its wifi gateway that triggers a HomeKit automation (which presumably runs on my Apple TV as the hub) to turn a Shelly relay on for one second to do the same thing as pressing the doorbell button. I think this all ends up just using my internal network, but who knows. Thank goodness the Shelly relay can get a wifi signal while stuffed into that electrical box in the basement ceiling.

(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.)

I'll have to check the latency of my 'smart' doorbell now. I have occasionally heard the doorbell, taken the obligatory time to find the key to unlock the door to find that it was just a package delivery, but enough time had passed that the courier was nowhere to be seen.

(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).

It takes a few seconds, but a lot of that is just the HA polling interval.

My suggestion is throw it all in the trash.

This is absurdity.

> the upcoming Samsung SmartThings API pricing

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.

Why does it matter that it’s a Korean company?

Money and personal data going out of the country is not a good thing.

Personal data going to companies in the country one resides in is also not a good thing.

The idea behind it was probably "Some company on the other side of the world"

Exactly. I’m not racist against Koreans. I’m racist against foreign conglomerates.

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