It takes 5 cloud services to hear my doorbell
35 points - last Friday at 3:34 PM
Sourceartisinal
today at 3:36 AM
I fail to see the relation between a video doorbell and stopping a burglar. Burglars wear masks.
Also, a doorbell ringing on the outside of the door is not only silly but in case of an apartment complex highly annoying for your neighbors.
And make sure your neighbors like being monitored through your five services.
Personally I have a button outside my front door. It is connected with a copper wire to the other side of the door to a small device that sends out an audible notification. No cloud required.
It's video surveillance, it makes it more likely they'll go elsewhere. That's literally the whole point of Ring.
artisinal
today at 3:50 AM
Then go for a CCTV system with local storage for the whole apartment complex instead of a cloud based personal surveillance system.
Then you don’t need 5 cloud services and people can go back to knocking.
I used to have local teenagers messing around on my property and it completely stopped after putting up some lights and cameras. It stops most casual crime.
artisinal
today at 3:43 AM
We are talking about burglars.
Yup, said teens would burgle stuff off my property.
mathisfun123
today at 3:45 AM
People steal things from stores which have had cctv for decades. I have no idea why people think these goofy webcams have any effect other than invading the privacy of your neighbors.
I literally just said it solved my problem. Most casual crime is opportunistic, and cameras and lights add uncertainty to the opportunity. Most people aren't willing to chance the camera for an opportunistic score.
mathisfun123
today at 3:50 AM
> Most casual crime is opportunistic, and cameras and lights add uncertainty to the opportunity. Most people aren't willing to chance the camera for an opportunistic score.
People have been stealing things from stores which have had cctv for decades. Your premises are manifestly false.
It's a good thing I don't live in a store, then
thesmtsolver2
today at 4:05 AM
And criminals have been caught using CCTV footage for decades.
VladVladikoff
today at 2:48 AM
I’ve recently been looking into what older gen IoT devices I can buy used for cheap and are also hackable (some existing progress has been done before me is my bar).
My first adventure was with an Amazon Echo Dot 2, I picked up two off Facebook marketplace for $5 each and managed to vibe code my way into a working implementation of LibreEcho (which does not currently support the echo dot). I’ve got that wired into my home local AI brain so it can do tasks like add grocery items to shared notes, or download movies or TV shows (jellyseer+flexget+jellyfin+etc).
My next plan is to do a doorbell. I want it fully local only and I know there are providers who offer this brand new for $$$ but I love the idea of picking up cheap IoT devices and hacking them instead. My current candidate is EZVIZ DB1C but I haven’t bought it yet and definitely open to suggestions!
It's crazy these things don't have much interopability with third parties.
Is it so difficult to expose a MQTT thing or some other random HTTP server, default off but configurable in some developer settings, that could be used to control the device/read state? It would certainly make the minority that is us power users happy.
VTimofeenko
today at 3:55 AM
Not exactly home gamer stuff, but there are devices like the Axis cameras which can push to a configured mqtt.
Generally ONVIF is the protocol one should be looking for in a camera, it indicates that the edge device can play ball with a central server (Frigate, Blue Iris, etc). Profile M specifies the metadata into external mqtt:
https://www.onvif.org/profiles/profile-m/
vghaisas
last Friday at 3:34 PM
I thought it was finally time to write up the story of my absurd home doorbell implementation, especially because the upcoming Samsung SmartThings API pricing means things will have to change soon.
Suggestions welcome!
I have a similar problem, except I needed to ring the actual doorbell. Currently I'm using a HomeKit-compatible video doorbell that communicates over proprietary radio to its wifi gateway that triggers a HomeKit automation (which presumably runs on my Apple TV as the hub) to turn a Shelly relay on for one second to do the same thing as pressing the doorbell button. I think this all ends up just using my internal network, but who knows. Thank goodness the Shelly relay can get a wifi signal while stuffed into that electrical box in the basement ceiling.
(The actual doorbell button is still there too, so it's a crapshoot which one somebody decides to use in the first place. And yes, many video doorbells have a "chime adapter" to take care of this, but our house's doorbell wiring made them run in fear.)
We have a Ring doorbell that hooks into the actual chime that the old doorbell used, so it still preserves the old doorbell's functionality[1]. I can understand not wanting to buy into the Ring ecosystem (we started using them before they were bought by Amazon), but maybe there are cheaper doorbells that also do that? All we had to do to make the old chime work with the Ring doorbell was install an extra widget that came with the Ring doorbell inside the chime; the Ring doorbell's instructions explained how to do it. It just needed a screwdriver and a few minutes' work.
[1] More precisely, we did until we moved to a manufactured home that did not even have a doorbell installed, after which I had to do some jiggering (now we have a Ring chime that the doorbell can talk to over the house's LAN). But the setup I describe above worked fine for a number of years in the house we were in before.
I'll have to check the latency of my 'smart' doorbell now. I have occasionally heard the doorbell, taken the obligatory time to find the key to unlock the door to find that it was just a package delivery, but enough time had passed that the courier was nowhere to be seen.
(Yours wasn't a latency issue though, what kind of latency do you get with your 5-cloud services chain?)
Also, interesting about the SmartThings API access moving to a subscription model: https://hackaday.com/2026/07/28/samsungs-smartthings-api-ter... (this link is in the article - the cost is only for third party usage, not if you're directly using the SmartThings app).
artisinal
today at 3:30 AM
> the upcoming Samsung SmartThings API pricing
Imagine paying a Korean company five bucks a months so you can get a notification on your phone that your fridge needs a new water filter.
People really need to touch grass.
Why does it matter that it’s a Korean company?
Peak Home Alone behavior right here.
Not sure if Blink is more locked down but Ring works alright with just Homebridge + HomePods
> ...then it would also helpfully play a sound on the doorbell...which we could not hear.
Sounds like a feature more than a bug.
I take it the house wasn't wired for a traditional doorbell and you didn't want to drill the necessary holes in the doorframe and wall?