How can I use home assistant to set up a front door intercom? Pointers to websites, blogs, forum entries, or videos would help, but those I have come across seem to ignore the setting up of two-way communication.
A bit of background: I used a Dahua integration from HACS to set up a new Amcrest AD110 so that I can get a video view through the camera. The video works well and the sound quality from the AD110 is just about acceptable, but I can’t find how to communicate from one of my wall-mounted device - e.g., in the workshop, to whoever is at the front door. The description of intercoms that I have come across don’t seem to address this apparently mundane need - nor do there seem to be any entities offered on my HA that would fit the bill.
Thank you tjmpugh and wmaker. I didn’t do enough research and thought that I could get something even better than a Zoom call latency. Having now read through several threads on this and other forums it seems unlikely that the Amcrest AD110 can form the basis of an even modestly usable video doorbell/intercom. For the moment I will go very old school with a wired analog intercom, mechanical doorbell chimes with a relay to outbuildings, and a simple low resolution/low latency video feed just to the workshop. The AD110 works well with smartphones (which I don’t use) so will be packed away in the hopes of hearing of some way that it can be used.
I will of course keep HA for controlling lights and heating where it is already proving its worth.
Pretty sure it works with SIP
SIP works on all devices
Just a real pain to setup SIP.
I’ve done the freepbx RasPi image and got it working but it seemed to much for long term maintenance in simple home. I shut it down until something simpler came available. I now moving to Duhua vto/bath which work out of box and has support for sip to other devices
I have spent quite a few hours now trying to get to grips with SIP. Since I designed, built and commissioned a doorbell/intercom with three germanium transistors and a small bunch of other things more than 50 years ago in less time than I have spent just reading up on SIP, I must agree that it is a pain in the posterior.
A subsidiary question: Is there any way of having the Amcrest Smart Home App called from a card on Home Assistant when the doorbell is pushed so that HA is minimized. It would also be nice if there was a way for HA to regain the foreground after a period of no speech on the intercom.
The background of this is that I have several ancient Asus Nexus 7 which I intend to wall mount as HA control panels. I was surprised to find they run the Amcrest App very acceptably as a video intercom on the Nexus 7 tablet.
You may look at the ability for Android and iOS to open installed apps from web links. In this case you can send notification to phone that open link(app) when clicked
Told you…sip is a beast.
I just bought the Duhua since it already has it(lazy way out). I got sip running but did not feel I would ever take time to learn it well enough to be comfortable with security of it. That said, nginx and Apache were easy in comparison.
Thank you tmjpugh. I think that a really good doorbell video intercom system will come to HA in the fullness of time. Unfortunately, my skill set means that I won’t be able to contribute - The 50 years ago mentioned above means that I am more at home with assembly language and knapping flint arrow heads.
Another possibility with the Nexus 7 is to use another Amcrest app called the Amcrest View app occupying half of the screen and HA running on Opera on the other half. HA will report the doorbell push and two-way communications and view through the doorbell camera are good on the View app. Although I haven’t yet found how to do it, I think it should be possible to corral the two apps in their own halves.
Incidentally, the reason I mentioned running HA on Opera is that for some reason the Chrome browser on this very early Nexus stalls while loading HA. This may be because it runs Android 4.3 which doesn’t seem to be upgradable. Having said that, both HA and Amcrest View seem to run smoothly on this vintage tablet.