This is a bit off topic, but this is a pretty diverse crowd, so maybe someone has some creative idea that I haven’t found.
I tried to add a second doorbell to my house today (finally) because when I’m in my office (most of the day), if someone rings the doorbell, I can’t hear it from downstairs. So I wanted to add one downstairs so that I can hear it. The problem I found was that the transformer wasn’t powerful enough to properly drive them both. Neither was the one that came with the kit, which was twice as powerful as the original at 10VA. So that idea is busted because I haven’t been able to find any 16VAC transformers higher than 10VA.
So I’m looking for some other idea to add another doorbell. I don’t want to go to wireless, and I really don’t need anything uber fancy. I’d rather stick with the wired button at the door and really, to the chime, whatever that may be. All of the wiring converges in one easy to get to location, so I would not be against the idea of some kind of electronic doorbell that I could wire up there with the power, button, and I imagine speakers in place of old school chimes. The ability for that to tie into HA and/or my DVR isn’t required, but at the same time, would be nice to have.
Anyone have any creative ideas that I haven’t been able to stumble upon?
I’m midway through building a minimal version of this (without the camera and gumph, just the ability for HA to interact with the doorbell), but I keep getting distracted
But yeah, rf doorbell, rf receiver and a bit of code and you have yourself a doorbell that HA can react to and message your phone or play a tune on the speakers or whatever.
Well, I don’t want RF, just hardwired, but that does give me an idea as to how I might be able to accomplish something. I could stick a Pi, or maybe even something like a ESP8266 (That one might be a little harder to figure out how to make work due to the coding) that has the button wired up to a +5 and a GPIO, which when pressed, triggers a relay off another GPIO to ‘fire’ the ‘old school’ doorbell powered off the AC transformer. While that in and of itself doesn’t help with the adding a second doorbell problem, it does open up the possibility of keeping the ‘old school’ doorbell as the primary upstairs and then something else for the second doorbell, such as a text, a message or something on my PC, message to HASS, (all of the above) etc., as well as the ability to turn it off, such as when my daughter is napping.
I am currently working on a Doorbell with camera and button.
I’m thinking for the button to connect the door bell button to a Sonoff gpio and have Home Assistant handling the sound on & off with automation’s.
My Doorbell consist in a Raspberry Pi Zero with a camera connected with Node-Red to take the pictures when a msg is pubished in a MQTT topic. atm I have Home-Assistant handling the rest, 1 automation to play a sound on my Xiaomi Gateway when the button is pressed another to send Telegram msg saying the doorbell as been pressed and the third one sending me the pic.
Also the last picture taken is being displayed in Home Assistant with the generic camera module.
I’m trying to migrate the telegram automations into Node-Red but since I am learning along the way takes some extra time
I haven’t give much attention to the button when because I think it will be easy either connect it to a Sonoff extra gpios or even to a esp8266 with ESPEasy.
I have a prototype button on a esp8266 with easpeasy running already for testing
The process of taking the picture, upload and receive it takes a few seconds, I’m thinking of adding a PIR sensor to the PiZero so the picture is taken when someone is nearby the door and when they press the button (or not) I already have the picture on my phone.
I have also thought of dropping the phone pictures/notifications and simple have a 3.5 screen connected to the Pi and have it video stream the camera video.
So your posts got me thinking (not sure why I didn’t get thinking before), and doing some more searching, I found a youtube video where someone set up a ESP8266 to do nothing but send a HTTP message when the button is pushed. That HTTP message than gets received by one or more machines on his network, doing, among other things, having a lightweight program running on his PCs play a doorbell sound.
I haven’t found the code to do that, because that portion, really, would be useful for the reason I wanted to add another bell, because that could have my PC, that when I’m working, I’m sitting at, play a doorbell sound. But I did find a really simple Arduino script that I was able to adapt to a ESP8266 with a button and when you press the button, it activates a relay, and when you release the button, the relay is released. This addresses the issue of keeping the ‘old school’ door bell upstairs (Except I’m not sure what’ll happen when I use a regular doorbell button with a light - will that light make the ESP think the button is pushed, or will it be not enough and it’ll still work the same way with a lit light? - I’ll have to play with it). Next, I need to find and figure out how to integrate code to send the HTTP (and/or MQTT) messages. That would be the best of both worlds. I don’t need a doorbell camera - I have cameras around my house connected to a DVR with motion recording that streams to a secondary backup location, so if you even walk up to my front door, you’re recorded on three cameras, pretty much from the moment you set foot on my property. But I’m not always watching the video, which is where the audio of a doorbell comes in. So I’m part way there. Just need to find and figure out the rest. Integrating with HASS would be nice, even if it was just something as simple as sending a text when the doorbell was rung.
If you use Esp Easy on esp8266 https://www.letscontrolit.com/wiki/index.php/ESPEasy and connect the door bell button to the esp8266 is a 5mins configuration without coding involved reporting thought MQTT when the button is pushed then you can have few automations in HASS to have it sound wherever you want whenever you want.
I also don’t really need the camera but I have a few PiZeros laying around and the camera module was only 5euros or less and overall makes the project a little bit more interesting
