Technology

Apologies if someone is offended by the following. It's not meant as an offense, but a professional opinion about design and Implementation.

This is a really good example of absolutely not keeping it simple and utilizing so many dependencies you'd need to monitor to be sure your solution works that the overall design is just plain bad.

If you ever implement something and get caught in so many things, take a step back and think about how your goal could be achieved in a much simpler way or even if your requirements are that important in the first place.

Anyhow. 5c from a tech guy.

My doorbell is a button that completes a circuit. Still works.

Thankfully, it takes still zero cloud services to make my breakfast, ride my bike, and open my door.

And you can bet on that I'll keep it that way.

My doorbell is a raspberry pi that uses webhooks to send me messages on my privately hosted chat server and also rings a physical bell built in 1900. Do I win for the most simple high tech doorbell?

You know we can roll back the internet a bit.. Let's keep the speed and the unlimited traffic but drop the "always on" and give people "mobile internet hours" for their phone? :P

Or you could just get a dog and never miss someone at the door again.

So instead of the video doorbell, use a simple camera. Then people knock on the door and you still have security footage without all the nonsense.

In related topics, I'm still peeved that my freezer, unlike my camera, needs to do a full back-and-forth trip (in this case to Samsung's SmartThings servers) just to notify my Home Assistant server that the door was left open.

I was tempted to run PoE to the other side of the wall where my server is. A doorbell that could do it all locally on my server.

Then I thought "fuck it" and bolted an antique brass bell there instead. At least you know it's working.

i would have just used the home assistant integration for blink and then have it also play the sounds.

I have a wireless doorbell with a speaker that plugs in to an outlet.

I'd much like to replace it with a zigbee-button, but I've had issues finding a foolproof (wife-approved) zigbee thing to make the ding-dong-noise.

Reolink for the win in my opinion.

Of course a nice brass bell as indicated would work too.

Don't they have relays for chimes?

Use the chime relay as a trigger for a real doorbell or ESP32 with a speaker.

Lot less dominos...

What should really be the case is that the ring doorbell has a contact switch that works like a regular doorbell. When the doorbell is pressed it triggers the exact same thing a plain old doorbell used to do. Now all the other electronic and cloud functions are neat features and if they go down it’s no big deal.

And that’s the story of how I upgraded my flat’s front door experience from depending on 0 cloud services to 5 cloud services.

Fin.