Hi I am trying to figure out how I can record when the doorbell is pressed or make an automation or something. I know there are multiple methods, but what is the best for HA? Ive read about connecting it to a raspberry pi zero, ive also seen people using esp8266 stuff. Thanks in advance.
Doorbell details?
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The good thing about HA is you can hack your hardware any old way you like 
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I really don’t know lol
I have an old fashioned chime doorbell… shoved an iris contact sensor (gen 2) next to the coil and when it’s energized it’s the same as a magnet going near it… I would suggest getting a different kind of contact sensor with an actual reed switch as the iris one is like an electronic “Hall effect” sensor I believe, so the positioning had to be just perfect.
Take a picture of your chime…
Take a look at the following guide, I was looking to do something similar (see my post) and ended up using this exact solution after I was pointed to the guide by DeadEnd.
It would probably be a great solution to your problem as well!
This solution is best I found.
But I’m thinking of puting the relay output as parallel to push button (less invasive method and push button should be working even when relay is broken/has no power) and detecting push button (closing the main circuit) by hall effect sensor.
Does it make sense ?
No it doesn’t. An electric doorbell will not work if it has no power.
That is a possibility, but I would not recommend this. You’d lose the ability to disable the chime (disable the relay) via software, while still being able to receive a notification when the doorbell button is pressed.
In the period I used Frenck’s DIY smart doorbell solution (1 to 2 years now), I never had any real problems* with it.
*in the beginning I had some false rings, but adding a pull-up resistor between 3.3V and GPIO2 immediately solved my issue. It was probably caused by a long wire between the doorbell and the ESP. There are more people who had this problem, see the comments underneath Frenck’s DIY guide.
I did something custom recently, I am using a relay which latches (not intentionally) when the doorbell is pressed, the coil is connected in serial with a 12VDC power source and the button. Once it latches, it triggers a set of timer relays, one rings the bell, the other waits to kill the power to the button for only a second, which resets the timer and delatches the trigger relay.
The relay latches because the led in the button draws just enough power through the coil. The benefit of it latching is that someone cant just press the button a bunch of times, the doorbell only rings once within the timer window (15s)
There is more to how it works than just that, and it actually looks EXTREMELY complicated and has a lot of steps (I am going to post in the projects forum when I finish a wiring diagram), but it ensures the reliability of the system as well as low power usage, since an AC transformer is no longer constantly powered.
I had it create persistent notifications in HA whenever a doorbell is pressed or when an automation mutes the doorbell chime (via another relay). The notifications also show up on my phone and TV, and a set of RGB bulbs that are always powered but off to give a color coded notification that an event occurred
I got a lot of… not flack, but more of a “are you wasting time and money on this?” attitude from the wife when I was setting this up, but when an amazon driver rang the doorbell at 7:45pm well after the baby was asleep, it all made sense
Update: I have learned a lot since I wrote this, and now I think I will do something like this:
Connect the wires from the doorbell to GPIO pins on a ESP8266 (probably NodeMCU or Wemos D1 Mini), and a relay in between the doorbell transformer and the chime to trigger the chime when needed.
This way, I can have a binary sensor for the doorbell button, and create an Automation to trigger the relay for something like 0.5 seconds, and if I would like I could also trigger the chime manually through home assistant, since the relay would be connected to the ESP8266.
Also, I would probably use ESPHome firmware on the ESP8266 since I am familiar with it. I will also post an update here when I get around to doing it.
Thanks for the ideas!
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Profile - shanem - Home Assistant Community - Can you share in more detail your method on this?
Any pics would be nice. I would like to do the same.