My wife and I are getting ready to start doing foster care. One of the requirements for the young 'uns is to have door chimes, especially out to our backyard where we have a pool.
So, I would like to find a way to make a chime sound when a door or window is opened. I see alot about getting a Xaomi gateway, but honestly I feel like I have enough stuff already around that buying another “thing” just for the chime is not where I want to be.
The house is hardwired and I used to have a Vista 15p alarm installed that chimed. I have since replaced the 15p with the HA Manual Alarm, using a pair of ESP8266’s to track the state of all windows and such and reporting via MQTT. I’d like a chime I could choose from because frankly, my dogs lose their mind over certain sounds. Microwave beep, not problem. Vista alarm door chime, no problem. One beep from a smoke detector on another floor of the house and it’s armageadon and I have a 60lb boxer mix sitting in my lap shivering and drooling. This is my life and my pets, don’t judge me.
I have plenty of potential noise makers in the house or available including:
Amazon Echo(s)
Raspberry Pi(s)
ESP8266 boards-a-plenty
Bluetooth speakers galore
Computers
A Ring doorbell
Google AIY Voice Kit
Any thoughts on how I could use any of these? While I’m proficient with ESPEasy, I don’t pretend to be an arduino or coding expert. I can usually hack away at stuff, but it’s not my area of expertise. I did get a Pi to run my Christmas lights a few years ago, so I have some skills.
I would probably use a python script to send MQTT to second RasPi/server running HA and utilize speakers for announcement.
I had speakers (1 or 2 per room) connected to amp+Chromecast and could cast mp3 from HA to Chromecast for alerts or play music.
Some amp have 2nd source input that may be mixed in or it will mute audio during alert
EDIT
I would replace Vista with RasPi but not sure if I would use ha for wired sensor, just python script to mqtt
HA work fine first time I setup gpio but when I setup at new home it was inconsistent. For this reason I might not use HA for input/process gpio
You could use the Command Line Notify component to play a sound file of your choice.
Alternatively, you could use the ESP8266 boards with a UART MP3 board to play a file from an attached SD card. I’m sure it could be done with novice coding skills in the Arduino IDE if you couldn’t find some pre-made code online (which I would be surprised if you couldn’t)
Does the Google AIY Voice kit show up as a Google Cast target? You could have a Text to Speech automation that says aloud the door that opened.
Probably the easiest and most reliable would be speakers connected to your HASS host + the command line notify component to play a sound - although depending on your house, it might not be heard from everywhere. You could augment that with the ESP8266 + MP3 board triggered via MQTT or HTTP.
