Smart door bell!!!

The latest and greatest is smart door bells with cameras. But what if you have other doors that people use to enter your house. I have two other doors that people come use to enter our house. They were not wired for door bells. So if I am in the other part of the house I may not hear them. 

With Home Assistant and a few other components that you may already have, you can have a smart door bell system. This is a cheap solution and there are a lot of options you can use for the "doorbell" button.

I decided that since I have a RF bridge already setup with Tasmota that I would use it as what would initiate the actions of my house and the automation system. Check  My blog post about RF bridge. 

I love RF devices and since I had all the infrastructure present, and the RF door bells were cheap, it was the route to go. This is the one I got: RF doorbell. They were only $7 us. They also have a tamper switch on the back which is nice.

The first step was to integrate them into HA. Now there are two methods that I found to work. This is all assuming, that you have some RF sniffer: Sonoff RF bridge or what ever. The setup for the physical device is easy open it up and activate it.

The highlighted line is what you get if bridge receives a code. The "13FC0E", is what you need. It is the RF key that the device sends.

So there is two ways that I know to amke this work and it did work for me.

1) Make an "ENTITY" in home assistant to see its state changes and use that for automations:

here is the yaml :

  - platform: mqtt

    state_topic: "tele/RF_Bridge/RESULT"

    name: 'Driveway doorbell'

    value_template: '{{value_json.RfReceived.Data}}'

    payload_on: '13FC0E'

    payload_off: '13FC0Eoff'

    qos: 1

The "payload_on" is that code you got. This button only gives you one code when the button is activated. So for the payload off just put off after the same number. It creates a a binary sensor that reads the state as on or off.

Now I use Node Red for all my automations so here the flow that I use to get the code and send an alert.

Its a pretty basic flow but the main components you need are the node in the yellow box and the red box

The node in yellow is the mqtt node you get the codes from:

The info you get from the console on the RF bridge:

The first piece of info is the state topic and the second highlighted info is the "code you need". That feeds into the switch node, the node circled in red. Now, you have to change the switch entry to "contains" or it will NOT work.

When the RF bridge gets the codes that your device sends, it will feed into the switch node, check it against the codes you gave it, and pass it on. You can then have it do what ever. I have it send Alexa TTS messages about the doorbell or what ever. If you want more info on Alexa TTS read my post on how I setup up my Alexa TTS.

I was pretty happy about how well this worked. For less than $20 I was able to get a cheap doorbell/button that I can automate and do all kinds of things.

Here is the code for my node red flow for this project. It has been scrubbed of my settings. You may not need everything in it or you may use it all. But feel free to share.

Github Node Red Code