this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2023
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Home Automation
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Home automation is the residential extension of building automation.
It is automation of the home, housework or household activity.
Home automation may include centralized control of lighting, HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning), appliances, security locks of gates and doors and other systems, to provide improved convenience, comfort, energy efficiency and security.
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I'm currently pretty happy with my Ring Pro 2 doorbell and iOS-based devices as the receiving side for button pushes at my front gate. I will say that it was hardly a good experience early on though, with the same exact issue you were seeing. Rings would come late, if the person was actually still standing there, interactive conversation was often impossible.
In my case it ended up being that the Ring seemed very finicky about staying connected to specific wifi configs, particularly newer wifi if I had most legacy speeds and protocols disabled. It won't do 5ghz fyi. I'm a network engineer by trade and have a Cisco enterprise deployment at home, so coverage outside to the Ring was not an issue, but it sure hated staying reliably connected, or initiating the connection when someone pushed it.
So, what I ended up doing was hiding a tiny little MikroTik 'mAP lite' in my plastic irrigation controller box near by: https://mikrotik.com/product/RBmAPL-2nD
The mAP Lite is a 2.4ghz-only access point about the size of 2/3 of a credit card, and thickness of an RJ45, literally, since it had to be thick enough to accommodate the ethernet jack. It can be powered with PoE. It supports a huge variety of modes but I'm using it in a bridging config wired to wireless. It can still have an addressable interface on the bridged ethernet network, so I retain access to configure it even though it's in bridge mode.
My irrigation box already had extra CAT5 in it home run to my wiring closet, as I'm using one of the wires for serial control from my home automation. So, all I needed to do was terminate one of the spare cables. Now I've got a tiny AP about ten feet from the Ring with wifi tailored just to it. I created a unique SSID that I joined it to, stuck it on its own vlan, and firewall rule lets it reach the internet. The wifi config on the Mikrotik that I found best serves the Ring was their "2Hz-only-G" band choice, channel width of 20 MHz, frequency of 2422 MHz. I'd initially left frequency to auto but it seemed to prefer one that would only achieve -74dB RSSI, but at 2422 it's consistently locked in at -67 dB and goes to live view instantly, and my phone gets the push notices within a second or two. So, initially sucked, after some work it's great.