My doorbell needs 5 cloud services to ring
It takes 5 cloud services to hear my doorbell
After a burglary, Vivek installed a Blink video doorbell, but it made answering the door harder: guests rang it, but the chime was outside and his wife didn't keep her phone nearby. To fix this without subscriptions or exposing his home server, he built a Rube Goldberg chain: the doorbell triggers an Alexa routine, which toggles a virtual bulb in SmartThings, which sends webhooks to a VPS, which a Home Assistant setup polls to play a sound on a Google Home Mini. It's worked for 18 months, but Samsung's new $4.99/month API fee threatens the setup.
Adding a doorbell has made it harder to open the door for guests.
- artisinal
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.
- VladVladikoff
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!
- johnhtodd
I am constantly amazed that people rely on anyone else's compute infrastructure for things like doorbells, cameras, locks, switches, or sensors (network infrastructure is, at the moment, a seemingly acceptable integration for isolated communication.) There is inevitable over-pricing and capture by these companies; it's in their nature.
Add to this the security and downtime risks, and the equation really doesn't look good. Equipment that is tied to someone else's cloud is an astonishingly bad idea, but everyone has their own immediate (or even long-term) reasons for ignoring advice. "You get what you deserve."
- disillusioned
So... you already owned Google Home minis... why not buy Google's Nest doorbell, which rings every Google Home device out of the box with none of the absurdity? If you have a Google 4k TV Streamer, it even pops up on your TV when someone rings the doorbell...
- stickfigure
The interesting thing here is that Samsung thinks they are going to get people to pay for API access to their smart devices, when "app access" is free. We are now past the point where LLMs can automate the apps. You don't even need to write the code, the LLM will do it for you.
As a recent owner of a Samsung fridge, I'm really curious to know what the plan is here. The probability of me paying a monthly for my refrigerator is exactly zero.