Making a doorbell smart with ESP8266

Automation Central Automation Hardware
#1

I’ve ordered a bunch of ESP8266-01 and I plan to play with them a bit. One of the project I’m thinking of is to make my doorbell smart.

It’s a wireless doorbell with the ringing part powered by 3 AA batteries, so 4.5V. I was thinking of connecting the ESP to the speaker wires (through a 5V to 3.3V step-down converter) to detect ringing. I’m pretty much a newbie when it comes to electronics so is there anything I’m missing or something I should be aware of?

#2

You could make it easy and use a homeseer beep/light detector to trigger a routine. You could hide that in the doorbell box. Which right now is on sale for a ridiculously cheap price!
HomeSeer HS-FS100-L Z-Wave Dual Sensor & Buzzer
Just a thought. It’s Z-Wave though. Mybe they have something of the like in your area?

I could suggest other projects for those 8266’s

1 Like
#3

ensuring shared/common grounding is likely going to be your biggest potential problem using an esp alone.

Depending on the board you may not actually need this. Double check your boards specs to be sure, but there are several boards which will work fine with an incoming 5v line signal.

Also grab a multi-meter and check the amount of power going to the speaker wires when triggered, alot of those style doorbells are only using 3v out to the speaker line.

1 Like
#4

I intentionally didn’t choose a retail solution as I want this to be a learning opportunity. However that seems like a very nice device and I’ll put it on my list for looking at later.

1 Like
#5

I’m totally into that stuff too.
You will post the project when it’s completed, right?

8266 projects i find interesting:
Presence/distance sensor - for things like car presence or room occupancy
bed sensor - can control how your lights react by who is in bed
Blind control

#6

Of course.

Other project ideas:

  • Make my building intercom smart. Not sure how hard this will be but I have the receiver in my apartment and it’s connected through only two wires. I don’t think I’ll be able to capture the voice (eg. to hear it remotely) but I should be able to at least emulate pressing the unlock button. We’ll see. :slight_smile:
  • A lighting project for various notifications using an individually addressable LED strip.
  • Add some remote functionality for my son’s toys but I’m not sure what yet.

Blind control is something I’m also looking into but from my brief research you need a pretty beefy stepper motor. Might just buy a retail device for this one.

#7