I wouldn't recommend crimping your own hookup wires as a hobbiest, especially not dupont. The unofficial tools for dupont mostly all suck, and the official tools are $400+[1].
For my own crimping of dupont, I'm using the Iwiss SN-025 which works OK, but even then I've mostly switched to Mini-PV because I was tired of the dupont receptacles wearing out after 5 cycles.
The pictured SN-28B is definitely not good for dupont, which has a totally round cable holding ring. Amazon/Aliexpress sellers don't know anything about what they are selling.
In the Voron 3D printer scene it has become quite popular to use the ENGINEER PA-2X series if you want to spend tens of £ rather than £3 (and don't have hundreds of £ for official tools).
Despite your link saying they "suck", I've found the light-touch, fully-manual nature of them give a much better feel for what you're doing (vs the cheap ratcheted ones; never used the official tool), and I got pretty efficient at crimping with them throughout my Voron 2.4 build.
The article said that Engineer PA-24 is good since it has cylindrical dies! I haven't tried it since I wanted to do the full crimp in one motion. Maybe that desire was irrational.
I'm not entirely sure which one I have, since I seem to have misplaced it, It's a PA-2X, where I'm not sure what the X is. By "cylindrical dies" is it referring to the shape of the inside of one-side of the die? What's the alternative?
I do recall that the design of the one I have, has little protrusions on one side of the die to encourage the wings to wrap under, so that they form a sort of m shape, with the ends of the wings "pressing" into the wire's sheathing for a nice grip. They cost somewhere in the region of £40-60 but I don't recall exactly.
I need to go and find out why they're not on their hanger on the pegboard I'm looking at, where they should be.
It's designed for an oval crimp around the insulation & a m-crimp on the wire. The typical cheap crimpers have two sizes of m-crimp, which is fine for a lot of JST connectors for example, but not this.
Ah, thanks for the explanation, that makes perfect sense.
I've not seen an m-crimp on both sides yet, sounds like it wouldn't work very well at all unless you had two wings on the connector itself to m-crimp the ends of, which I've also never seen!
Hey, this is good info. I’ve got the pictured Amazon seller kit, and it works really bad!
For the task of connecting 2.54mm “pin headers” on boards you prefer mini-pv. A little hard to search for, but does this require a special crimper of its own?
As a hobbiest you don’t recommend doing your own crimping at all, and I am willing to pay money, but I do kinda need specific lengths due to a tight enclosure without much room for excess ribbon (I guess round cable might be bit better). Is there such an option? I kinda searched for it, and on electronics retailers like digikey I didn’t really see the length I wanted, though it is easy to miss stuff on there.
> A little hard to search for, but does this require a special crimper of its own?
The IWISS SN-025 works well for the Mini-PV too. Which makes sense, since the dupont connectors are a near-clone designed for cheaper production.
> As a hobbiest you don’t recommend doing your own crimping at all
I just don't find it very enjoyable, especially getting to the point where I have tools that are actually suitable! The IWISS SN025 is fairly new[1] and before I ran across Matt's blog, reliable information on this subject was hard to find.
But I mean I have after all gone through the effort of getting tools and connectors, so it's more of a medium "recommend against" rather than a "not worth doing at all". It's almost like my preference with assembling PCBs. I don't mind that as much, and am good at it, but if I can just pay someone $20 to do it for me, I'll do that instead. Except I don't think there's any services at that price point for cable harnesses.
Not only are most third-party crimp tools kind of marginal, but if you're buying connector kits of Amazon/ebay/Aliexpress etc you're getting knockoffs too, so you have a lot of degrees of quality freedom between your crimp pin and your tooling.
And you're probably getting your connector and its mate from different manufacturers, too, which can have its own set of issues.
What is the real-world problem you’re concerned about?
Cheap tools may not crimp as well as the official tools (I have no doubt the differences in finished crimp geometry are real), but especially for low voltage connections like these, I have a hard time believing the end result is dangerous, or even particularly unreliable.
I don't have a problem with cheap tools. The problem is that lots of the crimpers sold for dupont just are not designed for them at all. It makes a big difference for both how long it takes (these tiny connectors move around a bunch) and just a minimum level of crimp quality.
The only real advantage of this seems to be the ability to disable the chime during quiet hours. Otherwise it seems like a much more failure-prone doorbell (more components means more things to break).
Why not go the other way entirely? Disable the chime, install a door knocker, and never worry about replacing outdated tech, dried capacitors, shorts or anything else for the rest of one’s life.
You can know if someone rings your doorbell when you aren't there is one tangible advantage. Or you can add a remote bell if you're often working in a basement, shed etc. If you don't want to deal with maintenance then don't, but some people like to play with stuff like this. The author of this article is one of the maintainers of ESPhome and one of the biggest contributors to Home Assistant, so he definitely is the tinkering sort of person.
I have a [local only, no cloud] doorbell with a camera that does person detection. It's one of my favorite devices and well worth it to me, especially since my delivery person basically never bothers to actually ring the doorbell.
Amcrest AD110 doorbell connected over wifi to a recycled HP mini-PC (can be had cheaply on Amazon) running Frigate (https://frigate.video/) with a Google Coral accelerator installed in one of the internal slots. The Amcrest doorbell does have a cloud video connection if you want, but I firewalled it off from the internet and use the local RTSP streaming over to Frigate. Frigate talks to my local Home Assistant install too for automation. Also built a little buzzer with an ESP8266 and a simple piezo buzzer that runs ESPHome, which Home Assistant can use to play little sounds for stuff like person at the front door, lightning strikes in the area, etc... whatever you want to. The doorbell also has a local API to expose notifications when the button is pressed, which you can link to HA with amcrest2mqtt.
The wifi connection for the doorbell isn't ideal for security purposes, but it's good enough and a lot easier than getting CAT5 to my doorbell. It is more or less 100% reliable with my home wifi setup, though again I'm not really counting on it for any sort of reliable home security.
OP is absolutely right tho that this setup requires work to put together and maintain. Configuring Frigate can be especially confusing, but there are other local options like BlueIris (paid, and Windows only which kills it for me but it is very capable). I've been in this game for many years so it's all easy to me, but getting started is definitely a learning curve. Very fun though, if it's your sort of thing. The DIY home automation community is in a bit of a golden age right now, IMO.
The Ubiquity doorbell also does local person and package detection in addition to standard motion detection. Indeed, it has a second camera aimed down specifically to detect packages: https://ui.com/us/en/camera-security/special-devices
You also need a Protect NVR to record video, manage the camera and provide notifications - the Cloud Key Plus works perfectly for up to a dozen or so cameras (uses standard laptop hard drive) - but they have a variety of devices that can run Protect from the UDM Pro (also will serve as a router/firewall) to larger dedicated Protect NVRs with four or seven disks depending on how much storage you want.
It can be a bit pricy for just a doorbell camera, but if you add a couple of other cameras then the value gets significantly better. Cloud is optional other than being required for initial configuration and is used for notifications, remote access and remote administration.
From TFA: "I hope you enjoy your DIY smart doorbell! However, now the time has come for me to come clean. This article was never about the doorbell! This article is about showing you how easy, fun, and cheap DIY smart home solutions are. ESPHome & Home Assistant are just amazing tools to allow everyone to jump in and create amazing things."
I followed these instructions and the main advantage for us is that it can send notifications to phones and google/alexa devices. I ended up switching the software to sinric.pro, though.
I have a device that "forwards" the bell sound to a receiver because my office is too far away to hear the bell otherwise. This would solve it, your suggestion would be even worse.
I did something similar, but as I didn’t have access to mains in an easy way (read: close enough to the doorbell) to power the ESP I built a small PSU that took the very unregulated 8VAC from the doorbell transformer into 5VDC (using a rectifier, LM7805 for regulation and some capacitors to smooth everything out). Everything was small enough so I could hide it in the actual doorbell as well!
Am I missing something? Neither schematics nor my limited understanding of physics explains why you need to, nor how it is possible to, bend one of the pins to disconnect GPIO0 (chip-row, 3rd from the left) from the reset pin (edge-row, 2nd from the left)...
Is it me? Have I been misusing my 8266s all this time?
Otherwise, good article, nice idea, great conclusion!
“This relay module board for the ESP-01(S), It comes pre-soldered, and the ESP will just slide on top of it.”
So, bending that pin breaks a connection between the CPU board and the relais board, so that pressing the doorbell wouldn’t be able to send a reset signal to the CPU, or, as the article says:
FTA: “Without this modification, a doorbell button push would result in a reset/restart of the chip, which of course, isn’t what we want”
That made me wonder why the hardware is hooked up that way by default in a device that gets sold for this specific purpose.
A few searches learnt me that the device has a deep sleep state where it uses very little power. The only way to wake it up externally from that state is through a reset.
=> I think that keeping that pin in place is the intended way to use this hardware combo.
The device would boot when the bell is rung, first close the relais switch to ring the bell, and then do any home automation stuff a few seconds later. Latencies look acceptable to me.
I ideally would want to power it completely from the button push or, at least, from the same adapter as the doorbell, but both will be challenging. The first doesn’t deliver enough power for long enough, the second likely doesn’t run on 3.3V.
Ahh! So it's not the ESP that has an extra connection, it's the relay breakout board.
That makes much more sense.
Yeah, I guess you would need to sound the doorbell every boot, and that might be inconvenient in places with a lot of power supply issues / loadshedding.
That said, that quick-boot-button link? That's some brilliant info right there.
> I guess you would need to sound the doorbell every boot
Funny that the store bought wireless doorbell I have does exactly that. :D I guessed it does that to avoid/reduce returns from people who doesn't manage to pair it with the doorbell button and think that it is "not working". So pre-emptively they do a chime right after you plugged in to show that it is working.
Let me take a swing at this: the chip itself has two GPIO. The dev board the chip is soldered to already uses up one of them for the reset system, allowing the chip to programmatically reset the whole board. You’re basically undoing that so you can use it. I’m guessing the consequence is you can no-longer have the software reset the whole device anymore.
And now if this is wrong, hopefully I’ll be corrected and we’ll learn more. :)
So yeah, turns out it's nothing to do with the 8266's board, and everything to do with the chosen relay module. Since it has nothing to do with driving the relay, it doesn't need to be connected. But if it were connected, whenever it is high, the relay board connects it to the reset, so the chip gets reset.
So you are bending it simply to ensure that pin can't be plugged in to the relay
I did a very similar hack a while ago, but in my case, I have a Ubiquiti video door bell, and I was having issues with it sometimes rebooting when it tried to ring the chime (after a specific software update, but only when it was cold out. I still have no idea if this a hardware or software problem, but I got tired of trying to diagnose).
Anyway, I also realized my chime wasn't audible in some parts of the house, so what I did instead was disable the hardwired chime completely, then get a fairly cheap wireless doorbell with 3 plug-in receivers scattered around the house. An esp8266 module (Wemos D1) is wired directly to the doorbell button, supplying 3.3V to ring it.
I use Home Assistant to send the signal from the Unifi doorbell to the esp8266. The biggest downside is the need to have Home Assistant, Unifi Protect and Wifi all running for my doorbell to work, but at the same time, I have a lot of automations that stop without those, the doorbell is not that high on my list of critical priorities. People can knock.
Kind of wish I had this when I had a baby that slept during the day: it would be trivial to schedule the chime not to ring at certain times of day.
I think personally, I'd go with a simple Zigbee or Z-Wave push-button if (when) I were to re-do my doorbell setup.
I use Home Assistant, with hundreds of devices in my home at this point. I spent so long looking for the right video doorbell and chime that I ultimately ended up with something both costly and somewhat unreliable.
I use the Amcrest AD410 with a custom component that polls it (issue 1), with all of the cloud and online stuff blocked in my network, and an Aeotec Siren / Doorbell 6. The Aeotec siren is utter trash and I'm now on my third one; two units had the audio hardware fail, and a silent door bell is pretty useless.
The one I have now hasn't failed yet, but it can be extremely unreliable and get lock-ups requiring me to open it and short out or de-solder the battery connector to get it to behave again if someone presses the doorbell too quick.
The button part has never been the hard part; the siren is; given there seems to be so little, high quality, smart siren hardware available I'd probably build one half of this setup; bell/siren + ESP and use a Z-Wave or Zigbee button to "push" the action of pressing the bell and have HA "ring" it.
Aside: Since the door chime is so unreliable, I have HA set up to announce the door on speakers, and lights to blink in various places when a press is detected too.
I'd then finally replace the multi-purpose video doorbell with a dedicated IP camera and this simple button; As I live in the UK, RMAing my first AD410 was a hassle (had to send it back to the US when it failed), and I was without a doorbell for weeks.
Since my front door is south-facing, the combination of direct sunlight, then cold cycles, coupled with heavy-handed delivery people smashing the button day in day out, basically crumbled the (matt black) casing to dust within 4 months of fitting it. It uses pogo pins to deliver power from the rear of the casing to the electronics so the compromised integrity of the casing resulted in it power cycling constantly.
There are just too many unreliable and expensive parts to what is a simple yet essential function of being a door bell, and the lesson I've learned is that the video functionality is best _not_ integrated. I _do_ still want a smart door bell though for its many benefits.
Can you tell me some more about that? I currently use ESPHome for a bunch of devices, but the automations they use are all driven through Home Assistant.
Is there a way to link devices directly over the WiFi with ESPHome?
EDIT: I think I understand what you meant now; not specifically ESPHome, but the nature of the deployment in the OP takes the "smarts" out of the critical path, allowing it to fall back to being an electro-mechanically actuated doorbell. This is certainly ideal, but I don't have anywhere I can place/power a chime near the doorbell hence the desire for a wireless connection between them. Would be great if I could somehow link two ESPHome devices wirelessly without the server so they can communicate if it's down (I suppose I could with an REST API if nothing else).
Interesting. They seem to warn against using the server for much as it's resource hungry and potentially unreliable, but that appears to be focused on the task of serving data; a simple webhook type use should be safer.
It'd be pretty amazing if ESPHome supported something like ZeroMQ[0], so you could talk between nodes in anything up-to full-mesh at a socket-level and not need to worry about the availability of a server to manage the traffic.
Not specifically a recommendation for doorbells, but if all you need is a relay with an ESP inside that you can flash to ESPHome et al., Sonoff or Shelly products are pretty neat ready-made options that incorporate a power supply from mains (and sometimes have some DC powering support too), a relay and a case.
Some models have an option of measuring temperature and/or power consumption as well.
Have somebody used a shelly 1 or so for this? I wonder how complicated this is because I look for a simple (maybe more expensive) but open and hackable solution
I like that aspect about this project as well. On the other hand, it's quite easy to see how following these directions to the T will take an enthusiast multiple hours to setup.
Many existing smart doorbells do actually use the existing wiring and chime of the doorbell. An example is the Google Nest Doorbell.
So in terms of "wasting what you already have" what you're wasting by going with a typical consumer product is basically a button that you can buy from Home Depot for $4.98.
Now, obviously, someone interested in this project is probably not interested in having a proprietary Google camera on their door. But in my experience most people who want their doorbell to be "smart" actually want it to be a security camera and a two-way communication device so you can relay information to the person who is ringing the doorbell. Otherwise, what good is it to know that someone rang your doorbell when there is no other information? That amount of information is just like a random timestamp, at that point I'd just keep my dumb doorbell.
Sure, the existing consumer smart doorbells serve exactly that need. But this project can be handy for someone, like me, who already has a camera pointed at their porch but not a smart doorbell. So, with this project, I could add an automation to push a picture from the front porch camera to my phone when someone rings the doorbell, for example.
I wouldn't recommend crimping your own hookup wires as a hobbiest, especially not dupont. The unofficial tools for dupont mostly all suck, and the official tools are $400+[1].
[1]: https://www.mattmillman.com/info/crimpconnectors/dupont-and-...
For my own crimping of dupont, I'm using the Iwiss SN-025 which works OK, but even then I've mostly switched to Mini-PV because I was tired of the dupont receptacles wearing out after 5 cycles.
The pictured SN-28B is definitely not good for dupont, which has a totally round cable holding ring. Amazon/Aliexpress sellers don't know anything about what they are selling.
In the Voron 3D printer scene it has become quite popular to use the ENGINEER PA-2X series if you want to spend tens of £ rather than £3 (and don't have hundreds of £ for official tools).
Despite your link saying they "suck", I've found the light-touch, fully-manual nature of them give a much better feel for what you're doing (vs the cheap ratcheted ones; never used the official tool), and I got pretty efficient at crimping with them throughout my Voron 2.4 build.
The article said that Engineer PA-24 is good since it has cylindrical dies! I haven't tried it since I wanted to do the full crimp in one motion. Maybe that desire was irrational.
I'm not entirely sure which one I have, since I seem to have misplaced it, It's a PA-2X, where I'm not sure what the X is. By "cylindrical dies" is it referring to the shape of the inside of one-side of the die? What's the alternative?
I do recall that the design of the one I have, has little protrusions on one side of the die to encourage the wings to wrap under, so that they form a sort of m shape, with the ends of the wings "pressing" into the wire's sheathing for a nice grip. They cost somewhere in the region of £40-60 but I don't recall exactly.
I need to go and find out why they're not on their hanger on the pegboard I'm looking at, where they should be.
This is mini-pv, but dupont is the same concept: https://i.imgur.com/bV1zUkm.jpeg
It's designed for an oval crimp around the insulation & a m-crimp on the wire. The typical cheap crimpers have two sizes of m-crimp, which is fine for a lot of JST connectors for example, but not this.
Ah, thanks for the explanation, that makes perfect sense.
I've not seen an m-crimp on both sides yet, sounds like it wouldn't work very well at all unless you had two wings on the connector itself to m-crimp the ends of, which I've also never seen!
Hey, this is good info. I’ve got the pictured Amazon seller kit, and it works really bad!
For the task of connecting 2.54mm “pin headers” on boards you prefer mini-pv. A little hard to search for, but does this require a special crimper of its own?
As a hobbiest you don’t recommend doing your own crimping at all, and I am willing to pay money, but I do kinda need specific lengths due to a tight enclosure without much room for excess ribbon (I guess round cable might be bit better). Is there such an option? I kinda searched for it, and on electronics retailers like digikey I didn’t really see the length I wanted, though it is easy to miss stuff on there.
> A little hard to search for, but does this require a special crimper of its own?
The IWISS SN-025 works well for the Mini-PV too. Which makes sense, since the dupont connectors are a near-clone designed for cheaper production.
> As a hobbiest you don’t recommend doing your own crimping at all
I just don't find it very enjoyable, especially getting to the point where I have tools that are actually suitable! The IWISS SN025 is fairly new[1] and before I ran across Matt's blog, reliable information on this subject was hard to find.
But I mean I have after all gone through the effort of getting tools and connectors, so it's more of a medium "recommend against" rather than a "not worth doing at all". It's almost like my preference with assembling PCBs. I don't mind that as much, and am good at it, but if I can just pay someone $20 to do it for me, I'll do that instead. Except I don't think there's any services at that price point for cable harnesses.
[1]: https://www.mattmillman.com/iwiss-sn-025-another-head-scratc...
> Except I don't think there's any services at that price point for cable harnesses.
I don't know of any either, but you can design around ready-made cables. Mouser and Digi-Key carry a pretty big selection.
As a counterpoint to official tooling:
I used a Engineer PA 09 which, despite its cheap look, is f'n amazing!
I crimped all wiring on my Voron myself, took some time getting used to it - but was almmost Zen-like meditation afterwards :)
Not only are most third-party crimp tools kind of marginal, but if you're buying connector kits of Amazon/ebay/Aliexpress etc you're getting knockoffs too, so you have a lot of degrees of quality freedom between your crimp pin and your tooling.
And you're probably getting your connector and its mate from different manufacturers, too, which can have its own set of issues.
What is the real-world problem you’re concerned about?
Cheap tools may not crimp as well as the official tools (I have no doubt the differences in finished crimp geometry are real), but especially for low voltage connections like these, I have a hard time believing the end result is dangerous, or even particularly unreliable.
I don't have a problem with cheap tools. The problem is that lots of the crimpers sold for dupont just are not designed for them at all. It makes a big difference for both how long it takes (these tiny connectors move around a bunch) and just a minimum level of crimp quality.
The only real advantage of this seems to be the ability to disable the chime during quiet hours. Otherwise it seems like a much more failure-prone doorbell (more components means more things to break).
Why not go the other way entirely? Disable the chime, install a door knocker, and never worry about replacing outdated tech, dried capacitors, shorts or anything else for the rest of one’s life.
You can know if someone rings your doorbell when you aren't there is one tangible advantage. Or you can add a remote bell if you're often working in a basement, shed etc. If you don't want to deal with maintenance then don't, but some people like to play with stuff like this. The author of this article is one of the maintainers of ESPhome and one of the biggest contributors to Home Assistant, so he definitely is the tinkering sort of person.
I have a [local only, no cloud] doorbell with a camera that does person detection. It's one of my favorite devices and well worth it to me, especially since my delivery person basically never bothers to actually ring the doorbell.
> I have a [local only, no cloud] doorbell with a camera that does person detection.
Would you maybe share with us how you built it/which parts you used?
Amcrest AD110 doorbell connected over wifi to a recycled HP mini-PC (can be had cheaply on Amazon) running Frigate (https://frigate.video/) with a Google Coral accelerator installed in one of the internal slots. The Amcrest doorbell does have a cloud video connection if you want, but I firewalled it off from the internet and use the local RTSP streaming over to Frigate. Frigate talks to my local Home Assistant install too for automation. Also built a little buzzer with an ESP8266 and a simple piezo buzzer that runs ESPHome, which Home Assistant can use to play little sounds for stuff like person at the front door, lightning strikes in the area, etc... whatever you want to. The doorbell also has a local API to expose notifications when the button is pressed, which you can link to HA with amcrest2mqtt.
The wifi connection for the doorbell isn't ideal for security purposes, but it's good enough and a lot easier than getting CAT5 to my doorbell. It is more or less 100% reliable with my home wifi setup, though again I'm not really counting on it for any sort of reliable home security.
OP is absolutely right tho that this setup requires work to put together and maintain. Configuring Frigate can be especially confusing, but there are other local options like BlueIris (paid, and Windows only which kills it for me but it is very capable). I've been in this game for many years so it's all easy to me, but getting started is definitely a learning curve. Very fun though, if it's your sort of thing. The DIY home automation community is in a bit of a golden age right now, IMO.
Thanks!
The Ubiquity doorbell also does local person and package detection in addition to standard motion detection. Indeed, it has a second camera aimed down specifically to detect packages: https://ui.com/us/en/camera-security/special-devices
You also need a Protect NVR to record video, manage the camera and provide notifications - the Cloud Key Plus works perfectly for up to a dozen or so cameras (uses standard laptop hard drive) - but they have a variety of devices that can run Protect from the UDM Pro (also will serve as a router/firewall) to larger dedicated Protect NVRs with four or seven disks depending on how much storage you want.
It can be a bit pricy for just a doorbell camera, but if you add a couple of other cameras then the value gets significantly better. Cloud is optional other than being required for initial configuration and is used for notifications, remote access and remote administration.
From TFA: "I hope you enjoy your DIY smart doorbell! However, now the time has come for me to come clean. This article was never about the doorbell! This article is about showing you how easy, fun, and cheap DIY smart home solutions are. ESPHome & Home Assistant are just amazing tools to allow everyone to jump in and create amazing things."
> Otherwise it seems like a much more failure-prone doorbell (more components means more things to break).
You don’t want to know how many components are involved in your regular smart doorbell. It is most likely going through the cloud too.
I followed these instructions and the main advantage for us is that it can send notifications to phones and google/alexa devices. I ended up switching the software to sinric.pro, though.
I have a device that "forwards" the bell sound to a receiver because my office is too far away to hear the bell otherwise. This would solve it, your suggestion would be even worse.
You can't hear a door knocker everywhere in the house, I'd guess.
I did something similar, but as I didn’t have access to mains in an easy way (read: close enough to the doorbell) to power the ESP I built a small PSU that took the very unregulated 8VAC from the doorbell transformer into 5VDC (using a rectifier, LM7805 for regulation and some capacitors to smooth everything out). Everything was small enough so I could hide it in the actual doorbell as well!
Am I missing something? Neither schematics nor my limited understanding of physics explains why you need to, nor how it is possible to, bend one of the pins to disconnect GPIO0 (chip-row, 3rd from the left) from the reset pin (edge-row, 2nd from the left)...
Is it me? Have I been misusing my 8266s all this time?
Otherwise, good article, nice idea, great conclusion!
I’m almost ignorant on this device, but FTA (https://frenck.dev/diy-smart-doorbell-for-just-2-dollar/#2-t...)
“This relay module board for the ESP-01(S), It comes pre-soldered, and the ESP will just slide on top of it.”
So, bending that pin breaks a connection between the CPU board and the relais board, so that pressing the doorbell wouldn’t be able to send a reset signal to the CPU, or, as the article says:
FTA: “Without this modification, a doorbell button push would result in a reset/restart of the chip, which of course, isn’t what we want”
That made me wonder why the hardware is hooked up that way by default in a device that gets sold for this specific purpose.
A few searches learnt me that the device has a deep sleep state where it uses very little power. The only way to wake it up externally from that state is through a reset.
https://johnmu.com/quick-boot-button/ taught me that it can boot in about 100ms, and get WiFi on in a few seconds.
=> I think that keeping that pin in place is the intended way to use this hardware combo.
The device would boot when the bell is rung, first close the relais switch to ring the bell, and then do any home automation stuff a few seconds later. Latencies look acceptable to me.
I ideally would want to power it completely from the button push or, at least, from the same adapter as the doorbell, but both will be challenging. The first doesn’t deliver enough power for long enough, the second likely doesn’t run on 3.3V.
> The first doesn’t deliver enough power for long enough
Charge up a capacitor, maybe?
Ahh! So it's not the ESP that has an extra connection, it's the relay breakout board.
That makes much more sense.
Yeah, I guess you would need to sound the doorbell every boot, and that might be inconvenient in places with a lot of power supply issues / loadshedding.
That said, that quick-boot-button link? That's some brilliant info right there.
> I guess you would need to sound the doorbell every boot
Funny that the store bought wireless doorbell I have does exactly that. :D I guessed it does that to avoid/reduce returns from people who doesn't manage to pair it with the doorbell button and think that it is "not working". So pre-emptively they do a chime right after you plugged in to show that it is working.
> I guess you would need to sound the doorbell every boot
It disconnects from wifi when rebooting, doesn’t it?
Let me take a swing at this: the chip itself has two GPIO. The dev board the chip is soldered to already uses up one of them for the reset system, allowing the chip to programmatically reset the whole board. You’re basically undoing that so you can use it. I’m guessing the consequence is you can no-longer have the software reset the whole device anymore.
And now if this is wrong, hopefully I’ll be corrected and we’ll learn more. :)
Cunningham's law baiting - I love it!
So yeah, turns out it's nothing to do with the 8266's board, and everything to do with the chosen relay module. Since it has nothing to do with driving the relay, it doesn't need to be connected. But if it were connected, whenever it is high, the relay board connects it to the reset, so the chip gets reset.
So you are bending it simply to ensure that pin can't be plugged in to the relay
There's some DRMed video that shows how to do it, and some text explaining why:
https://i.imgur.com/nNMMdhF.png
Yeah, somehow I completely misread that sentence.
It's explained in the article.
I did a very similar hack a while ago, but in my case, I have a Ubiquiti video door bell, and I was having issues with it sometimes rebooting when it tried to ring the chime (after a specific software update, but only when it was cold out. I still have no idea if this a hardware or software problem, but I got tired of trying to diagnose).
Anyway, I also realized my chime wasn't audible in some parts of the house, so what I did instead was disable the hardwired chime completely, then get a fairly cheap wireless doorbell with 3 plug-in receivers scattered around the house. An esp8266 module (Wemos D1) is wired directly to the doorbell button, supplying 3.3V to ring it.
I use Home Assistant to send the signal from the Unifi doorbell to the esp8266. The biggest downside is the need to have Home Assistant, Unifi Protect and Wifi all running for my doorbell to work, but at the same time, I have a lot of automations that stop without those, the doorbell is not that high on my list of critical priorities. People can knock.
Kind of wish I had this when I had a baby that slept during the day: it would be trivial to schedule the chime not to ring at certain times of day.
I did a write-up: https://imgur.com/gallery/wifi-doorbell-chime-QTYYQs4
> The biggest downside is the need to have Home Assistant, Unifi Protect and Wifi all running for my doorbell to work
It's no wonder delivery people just knock and leave nowadays.
I think personally, I'd go with a simple Zigbee or Z-Wave push-button if (when) I were to re-do my doorbell setup.
I use Home Assistant, with hundreds of devices in my home at this point. I spent so long looking for the right video doorbell and chime that I ultimately ended up with something both costly and somewhat unreliable.
I use the Amcrest AD410 with a custom component that polls it (issue 1), with all of the cloud and online stuff blocked in my network, and an Aeotec Siren / Doorbell 6. The Aeotec siren is utter trash and I'm now on my third one; two units had the audio hardware fail, and a silent door bell is pretty useless.
The one I have now hasn't failed yet, but it can be extremely unreliable and get lock-ups requiring me to open it and short out or de-solder the battery connector to get it to behave again if someone presses the doorbell too quick.
The button part has never been the hard part; the siren is; given there seems to be so little, high quality, smart siren hardware available I'd probably build one half of this setup; bell/siren + ESP and use a Z-Wave or Zigbee button to "push" the action of pressing the bell and have HA "ring" it.
Aside: Since the door chime is so unreliable, I have HA set up to announce the door on speakers, and lights to blink in various places when a press is detected too.
I'd then finally replace the multi-purpose video doorbell with a dedicated IP camera and this simple button; As I live in the UK, RMAing my first AD410 was a hassle (had to send it back to the US when it failed), and I was without a doorbell for weeks.
Since my front door is south-facing, the combination of direct sunlight, then cold cycles, coupled with heavy-handed delivery people smashing the button day in day out, basically crumbled the (matt black) casing to dust within 4 months of fitting it. It uses pogo pins to deliver power from the rear of the casing to the electronics so the compromised integrity of the casing resulted in it power cycling constantly.
There are just too many unreliable and expensive parts to what is a simple yet essential function of being a door bell, and the lesson I've learned is that the video functionality is best _not_ integrated. I _do_ still want a smart door bell though for its many benefits.
The benefit of using ESPHome is that the chime would still ring if your bridge/server is down.
Can you tell me some more about that? I currently use ESPHome for a bunch of devices, but the automations they use are all driven through Home Assistant.
Is there a way to link devices directly over the WiFi with ESPHome?
EDIT: I think I understand what you meant now; not specifically ESPHome, but the nature of the deployment in the OP takes the "smarts" out of the critical path, allowing it to fall back to being an electro-mechanically actuated doorbell. This is certainly ideal, but I don't have anywhere I can place/power a chime near the doorbell hence the desire for a wireless connection between them. Would be great if I could somehow link two ESPHome devices wirelessly without the server so they can communicate if it's down (I suppose I could with an REST API if nothing else).
I meant in particular with ESPHome you can program automations that work if WiFi is down. Like, if button is pressed, toggle relay for 3 seconds.
Furthermore, you can have wireless communication between ESPNodes: https://esphome.io/cookbook/http_request_sensor
Interesting. They seem to warn against using the server for much as it's resource hungry and potentially unreliable, but that appears to be focused on the task of serving data; a simple webhook type use should be safer.
It'd be pretty amazing if ESPHome supported something like ZeroMQ[0], so you could talk between nodes in anything up-to full-mesh at a socket-level and not need to worry about the availability of a server to manage the traffic.
[0] https://zeromq.org/
https://web.archive.org/web/20240319182434/https://frenck.de...
Beware that the relay may flap on boot with this exact setup.
https://github.com/IOT-MCU/ESP-01S-Relay-v1.0/issues/1
https://github.com/IOT-MCU/ESP-01S-Relay-v4.0/issues/1
https://rabbithole.wwwdotorg.org/2017/03/28/esp8266-gpio.htm...
Not specifically a recommendation for doorbells, but if all you need is a relay with an ESP inside that you can flash to ESPHome et al., Sonoff or Shelly products are pretty neat ready-made options that incorporate a power supply from mains (and sometimes have some DC powering support too), a relay and a case.
Some models have an option of measuring temperature and/or power consumption as well.
Unfortunatly, the chime transformer provides 12V AC and a Shelly requires 110-230V AC or 24 – 30V DC.
Sonoff S31s smart plugs drive my house!
> I’m not planning on doing articles or videos on my ventilation setup. Mainly because well… it is just an on/off switch?
The irony of the author responding to another request on his site with the sentence "well… it is just an on/off switch".
very cool, but too bulky for what it is. for just 4$ you can have this one https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256806558695914.html
> too bulky for what it is. for just 4$ you can have this...
...thing that is 2 inches across and 0.5 inches tall to use as a doorbell button?
+ an external power supply
Doesn't it also need a Zigbee gateway?
a single gateway, hundreds of buttons. One power supply, not hundreds!
This does not look waterproof.
Have somebody used a shelly 1 or so for this? I wonder how complicated this is because I look for a simple (maybe more expensive) but open and hackable solution
Yes, someone has
https://community.home-assistant.io/t/make-a-dumb-doorbell-s...
Nice project - so many projects don't take advantage of what you already have.
I like that aspect about this project as well. On the other hand, it's quite easy to see how following these directions to the T will take an enthusiast multiple hours to setup.
Many existing smart doorbells do actually use the existing wiring and chime of the doorbell. An example is the Google Nest Doorbell.
So in terms of "wasting what you already have" what you're wasting by going with a typical consumer product is basically a button that you can buy from Home Depot for $4.98.
Now, obviously, someone interested in this project is probably not interested in having a proprietary Google camera on their door. But in my experience most people who want their doorbell to be "smart" actually want it to be a security camera and a two-way communication device so you can relay information to the person who is ringing the doorbell. Otherwise, what good is it to know that someone rang your doorbell when there is no other information? That amount of information is just like a random timestamp, at that point I'd just keep my dumb doorbell.
Sure, the existing consumer smart doorbells serve exactly that need. But this project can be handy for someone, like me, who already has a camera pointed at their porch but not a smart doorbell. So, with this project, I could add an automation to push a picture from the front porch camera to my phone when someone rings the doorbell, for example.
Great example, that makes a lot of sense.
This website is designed for text browsers.
A bit disappointing, having to add a 5V charger (and find a wall socket to plug it into) when the doorbell circuit already provides 24V.
[flagged]
Even the desktop view feels claustrophobic, with the fixed top/bottom bars.
Exactly, I thought his design was long gone the way of the IE toolbars.
I use a "kill sticky" bookmarklet for this purpose which removes position:fixed elements and similar junk.
Looks completely fine to me. (Safari, latest non-beta iOS)
I'm on android, chrome on S24 Ultra - website is unusable, everything is all over the place.
Fine for me on Firefox/Android. Not a big fan of the header and footer but it seema perfect readable/usable.