I’ve already tried a vibration sensor which gave me too many false positives regardless of the sensitivity I’ve set it to. So my current attempt is using a sound sensor (KY-037) with a regular ESP8266. I’ve connected it to the digital output of the microphone and changed the sensitivity just before the LED constantly lights up.
The main problem I have after trying it out a bit is that the sound of my door ringing is not really constant? Without any restrictions on my binary sensor it switches really fast between ON and OFF so the delayed_on is not really working out which I’d find good to avoid false positives.
I’m not too familiar with ESPHome so I’d appreciate tips how to avoid this problem to get a stable binary sensor. Surely there’s filters I can set up for this.
Why not just use the handheld part disconnecting from the base as your trigger and then it will be much more dependable and reliable because, there will be no question where someone picks it up and if its hung up or not in use. I definitely wouldn’t use a sound sensor for something like this.
Is there a button on the base that is pressed down when the handset is not in use and connected to the base?
Then you need to pop it open, find a set of wires you attach to in parallel. When someone rings you there is an electic signal that gets sent to your phone and causes it to ring.
You need to take your voltmeter and while someone else rings the door, you need to probe the wires and identify a wire that is either going High or is already High and goes Low when the doorbell is pressed.
Once you identify that, then you can wire it to an esp gpio pin as a binary_sensor. This is dependent on what voltage you are reading initially and may need to attatch a mosfet, optoisolator, etc so you can use that voltage if its to high.
Its really not as complicated as it may sound, i promise. There shouldnt be many wires coming into your receiver and it looks like theres plenty of room in the housing to stuff your esp board inside of too. There should be a power supply in there and you can tap that to power your board. Nice and easy, nice and clean installation!
Thanks for the response. That would probably be the most efficient and usable solution but I unfortunately see some problems with that approach.
I’m renting the apartment and fiddling with the insides of the intercom might not be the best idea
It may be simple to someone who knows about this stuff but I have no knowledge whatsoever about the stuff you mentioned So without a good guide I wouldn’t even know where to start
I can post a picture later of the insides of the intercom to give you an idea of what I have though. My preferred solution is still, altough not the best, some external sensor that doesn’t involve modifying the intercom
What is really fast here? It’s impossible to suggest without knowing.
Adjust the sensor potentiometer to have optimal trigger threshold.
Set delayed on, just high enough not to have false triggers for example 50ms.
Set delayed off to the whole ringing time for example 10s.
Didn’t have ms in my timestamp but after playing around a bit it doesn’t seem to be nearly as reliable as I’d hoped. It triggers from closing the apartment door more consistently than it does from the doorbell So that’s a scrap unfortunately.
Here’s a pic of the internals. So if anyone has an idea that a layman such as myself can do without potentially destroying the intercom feel free to post it.
Post pictures of how you’ve got the esp board wired up.
Did you find or get yourself a voltmeter yet?
Does it only bounce around like that when you press the button or does it always bounce around On/Off?
If you dont have a meter yet, you should be able to clean up that sensor output by applying some sensor filtets like “debounce” would be one id try. Sometimes you just have to play around with teying 1 or more applicable filters and their setting/timing.
One thing you can look for is if it’s ringing from the base of the phone or from the hand unit.
Our ring from the hand unit and has a lot more complex circuit so I also had to go for the microphone route.
This is the receiver part in your home, correct? That symbol towards the top left with (gn. ge) that looks sorta like a speaker/buzzer symbol, thats probably a good place to start testing with your meter. See if those have a voltage before or during a doorbell button press. Once you find the button wires that come to your receiver box, thats all you need and can tie onto that with your esp boad and use it as an Input sensor(binary_sensor) and then get rid of that sound sensor or any other silly sensors that aren’t necessary.
That’s not easy place to get sensor input. If it’s traditional speaker, you find AC voltage.
But if you can manage to print the raw sensor output with timestamp, we can make a filter to match that. Also, that sensor have potentiometer to adjust the trigger.
Since It wasn’t obvious, i’ll try again. I was simply making the point that there are symbols, one for speaker and one for something else and those would be good places to start probing to find the wires that come from the other button in the other half of the system.
What’s your point? Are you scared of AC and wont use it? I’ll hold your hand Cupcake!
Does all this signal bouncing not make you curious? Does it seem like a better idea to Jimmy rig something and over complicate it just to make a sensor that does one task. read a button state?
This Intercom system is an Analog system, not a digital one which is why it’s bouncing all over. Why you are entertaining the OP with that ridiculous sound sensor is beyond me. Sometimes even their questions are wrong and you need to correct or fix the question before you can address the problem.
I have a voltmeter though I’m not sure how to check anything on my doorbell. It bounces only when ringing. Is the debounce available for binary sensors? I’ll have to try that
To address the other comments… I have basically no knowledge whatsoever with electronics so anything involving the base phones inner workings is probably beyond my skills. I’m also renting so I’d like to avoid potentially breaking anything.
I’ll see if I can get more accurate timestamps tomorrow.
I’m open to all the other ideas but with my very limited knowledge I’d more inclined to go the non-invasive route via external sensors that are probably not as failsafe
So without a good guide I wouldn’t even know where to start
So that’s a scrap unfortunately.
