Hacking an RF doorbell to work with Home Assistant

Hardware
1

Hello, I have currently got an RF doorbell which works fine and I’ve been using a cheap receiver paired with a NodeMCU running open MQTT gateway to intercept the signal and send the RF codes to Home Assistant, the only problem is that it seems very unreliable and only works half the time.

My other idea would be to use the NodeMCU and connect it to the doorbell receiver which works 100% of the time. I was thinking the most reliable way would be to connect it to something within the receiver which turns on when the doorbell is pushed, maybe an LED or something?

Can anyone suggest the best way of connecting this up?

2

I tackled this problem at the weekend. My solution is just to put my rf receiver within a meter of the source.

3

I have the same setup with OpenMQTTgateway and it works great for me. What RF receiver are you using? I also made a package for using 433mhz door/windowsensor and pir as alarm works great. I use this module with a 17cm cable as a antenna

4

automation:

  • alias: ‘Door bell’
    initial_state: ‘off’
    trigger:
    • platform: state
      entity_id:
      • binary_sensor.doorbell
        to: ‘on’
        action:
    • service: notify.leandro
      data_template:
      message: “Alarm tripped at {{ trigger.to_state.attributes.friendly_name }}”
      data:
      priority: ‘1’

###########

  • platform: mqtt
    name: “doorbell”
    state_topic: “home/433toMQTT” # defined by subjectGTWRFtoMQTT in User_config.h
    command_topic: “home/commands/433toMQTT/”
    payload_on: “5484284”
    payload_off: “1”
    optimistic: false
    retain: true
    device_class: opening