Recommendation video door bell?

Hi,
I have a Nest Doorbell (1st Gen) and can not recommend it.

Cons:

  • Wifi is spotty, i feel like when it is either very cold or hot the wifi connection is gone
  • Openhab integration is very basic (it is detected as a camera, so you can’t acces many of the doorbell features like switching off the bell
  • Cloud connection neccessary, you can’t just access the video feed

Pro:

  • The camera is very good in every light condition
  • It integrates with my old doorbell chime and the doorbell is reliable
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I’m very happy with unifi doorbell, but it requires a unifi controller cloudkey or nvr. There is a binding for it.

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I have a Nest (latest version) and I’m happy with it but I don’t have the same requirements so it probably won’t be a good fit for you.

It’s wired and works great with the existing doorbell (once I upgraded the transformer). The camera is great day and night. You don’t need proprietary hardware but you do need to use their cloud service to see the camera feed and get the alerts and you have to pay a subscription to get stuff like individual person recognition, package dropoff detection, etc.

But we are fine with that. I don’t have it integrated with OH because I don’t have a need for it. The Nest app does everything I need. I probably couldn’t if I want to because the transition from my Nest account to Google account got borked and even Google Assistant can’t see my Nest devices. :slightly_frowning_face:

I have not experienced the same WiFi issues @BobMiles reports and it gets pretty cold here too so YMMV on that front.

Were I to replace it, I might consider looking at Wyse. It is possible to get at their camera feeds and there is a pretty good Wyse API project on GitHub that has reverse engineered Wyse’s API. But that of course is brittle and requires an extra service to run alongside OH to make it work.

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The wifi issues probably are a 1st gen thing, so they might not be applicable anymore!
I really miss being able to set the DND mode via the api though. In the app you can set it to three hours max and only manually…

Oh wow, that is quite some feedback! Thanks a lot!
The UniFi systems looks interesting. It looks like I can use my QNAP server as an alternative for the NVR by Ubiquiti. I shall dig a little bit deeper into this topic.

What I am actually still not sure is whether would want to use the cloud service of the manufacturers or whether I shall integrate the bell to openHAB. I basically see 2 use cases and 1 future use case. Use cases 1 and 2 should be possible with openHAB but with use case 3 I am not so sure.

Use case 1: I am at home sitting in my home office and during a call someone rings the door bell:

  • Thanks to my classic gong I would immediately get informed that someone is at the door
  • Within 2-3 seconds I get 1-3 still pictures on my phone (i.e. via WhatsApp if it is supported with Callmebot)
  • Due to the classic gong latency app wise does not play a big role

Use case 2: I am not at home and want to get informed when somebody rang the bell

  • I want to receive again a picture and this time I am not in my home network and also normally do not have an active VPN connection
  • Again not time critical. Information within 5 seconds would be sufficient.

Future use case 3 in a few years: Kids come home from school and forgot their keys to enter the house

  • Kids ring the bell and I get informed again via phone
  • I am able to either talk live to them (like a phone call) or at least can play an audio message which I sent to the doorbell and I can hear an audio message which was spoken at the door

I think particularly use case 3 is supported with lots of proprietary systems but I am not so sure about doing it by myself. Is this even possible with openHAB?

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That is probably going to mean some custom DIY work and not a 100% off the shelf product.

For example I use this doorbell powered off a halogen light AC transformer with no bell mech. Then openHAB rules trigger the sound when I want it to go off using chromecast and google home hubs that are around the house. The bell sound can be cusomised or turn down low or off as your rule sees fit. There are many ways to achieve this like using relays to remove the mech bell.

Working doorbell: Hikvision DS-HD1 - Tutorials & Examples / Solutions - openHAB Community

The above camera does not tell you when the button is pressed without hacks or DIY work, however I find the PIR sensor good enough to trigger the bell automatically. I have found a large majority of our visitors will not press the button and parcels just get left at the door. The value in a button push for me is very low now I have seen the percentage of people that actually push the button which may be caused by the fact it is a camera doorbell. If a button push is important there are ways to add it.

It could be even better. Both at home and away you could receive not only a picture, but an incoming videocall, and you could talk to visitor, see him, open a door for him, or trigger alarm. And when kids will come home from school and forgot their keys, they could either use an NFC-tag, attached to their clothes or backpacks, or trigger face recognition service to open the door, and yes, you will be notified both with a photo.
I’m not using keys anymore, cause I have 4 different ways to open my doors/gates.

Great idea. I am not sure whether it works on my side as I am living in a „townhouse“ (Reihenhaus). 3 houses in a row and I live in the 1st house. If someone wants to visit the 2nd or 3rd house the PIR will still trigger. So to increase the WAF I would still go for a classical button

However, I like your idea which you have initially described. The DIY could work with a Wifi relay which I can hide inside the „gong“ housing. When someone pushes the button I can trigger the relay for 500 ms which should produce the classical ding-dong again.

Nice, really nice! Currently I cannot open my doors without keys so there would be more work to be done. But it would be a nice upgrade in the future.

Hello all,

I have a Foscam VD1 which is ok.
Read the door chime button via HTTPLister binding and output an audio sound via Amazon Echo.
As far as I know you can also download video and images directly from the camera via FTP.
See also my entries in the forum about the Foscam

Greetings Holger

One thing to consider is also if you have to pay subscription fees as well as where is the data stored. One of the reasons I went with UniFi doorbell is that there are no subscriptionfees and the data is stored locally on your own hardware.

/S

I had a Ring Video Doorbell Pro, but I got fed up with it sending videos of my visitors to somewhere in the USA (I live in Switzerland - this may even be illegal activity here). I replaced it with a UniFi G4, which stores any videos in my local network (admittedly, that requires a UniFi UDM Pro, but I had that already).

The biggest problem that I found was getting digital chimes that will work with the UniFi G4. That is an area where Ring is actually very good. I solved this by setting up a Homebridge server that links the UniFi G4 to my Ring chimes. I’m very pleased with the result.

Steve

I moved from the Sky Bell (used for 5+ years) to Amrcrest AD410 Doorbell. I have it fully integrated with OpenHab

Pro

  1. High resolution images day or night -
  2. Stable WIFI
  3. Works with OpenHab ipcamera biding - you can get images and motion sensor
  4. Stable WiFi connections
  5. Store videos locally (SD Card) also works with Armcrest DVR

Cons

  1. Sometime the doorbell is few second delayed - person press and it take 10-30 sec for the bell inside the house to ring

Amcrest 4-Megapixel Video Doorbell Camera Pro, Outdoor Smart Home 2.4GHz and 5GHz Wireless WiFi Doorbell Camera, Micro SD Card, PIR Motion Detector, IP65 Weatherproof, 2-Way Audio, 164º Wide-Angle Wi-Fi AD410

Harry

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You don’t need a homebridge solution for that. The unifi protect binding for openhab can detect the ring the same way. I do the chime with the sonos binding when someone pushes the doorbell.

You don’t need an udm/pro it is enough with a ckg2+ or unifi nvr.

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@Seaside You mean that the Sonos binding handles Ring chimes? Nice.

I had a UDM Pro anyway.

However, I like your idea which you have initially described. The DIY could work with a Wifi relay which I can hide inside the „gong“ housing. When someone pushes the button I can trigger the relay for 500 ms which should produce the classical ding-dong again.

I have a Shelly 1 connected to the doorbell button. You could use the output of the Shelly to connect to the classical ding-dong but I did’t do this. I use the audio sink to play a dingdong mp3 on all connected tablets in the house and send a Telegram notification. Instantly the notification is send to the mobile devices. I have an IP camera above the door, I just haven’t got the time to extend the rule in order to send the picture via Telegram, but it should be possible.
You can fiddle around with the rule when the dingdong sound should be played and when not.

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That sounds quite cheap and yet powerful. Due to the above position of the camera I guess you can’t really see faces but still get an idea: Is it family, is it parcel service or just somebody I do not want to open the door for. Am I right?

I would position the camera a bit lower to get a clear view. Now I constantly record the camera feed with an external NVR, but my plan is to use the IPCamera binding to send a screenshot with the Telegram notification in the future. I just have to migrate Openhab from my Raspberry to quicker hardware before that. But the IPCamera binding has a feature to capture jpeg files which can be send by the telegram binding. I tested this a while ago and it works. I just need to combine all the tests to one solution.
Thus far the solution with the Shelly runs stable for the last 5 months. Reasons why I made this: No cloud subscriptions, no external company’s to decide the solution is no longer supported and the sport to get it to work.

I used this wiring diagram as example. The Shelly is connected to a 12v DC adapter. The chime can run any voltage needed (not just the 8v shown in the picture).

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Have you tried to narrow this down as to why or tried different firmware versions? Is it possible that the person did not press the button, but instead pressed the cameras lens? That is a common issue that people see the black lens and push on it instead of the button even when the button has a bright LED ring around it.

I have also noticed that many people do not press the bell and not sure if this is they don’t like the idea of a photo or video of them being taken so they opt to knock on the door.

Yes that is a good idea, delivery people often wear baseball caps that hide their face from cameras mounted up high. Also its a general rule that to clearly ID a persons face the camera has to be very CLOSE and you loose distance the further up the wall you mount them. A balance between someone damaging the camera VS actually getting usual footage to ID a person needs to be considered.

A lot of the API cameras made by Dahua/Amcrest and Hikvision can do the same thing by using their Alarm input and output terminals. You could save money by choosing a camera with these terminals instead of using a shelly.

You can create a rule that triggers on the ring event (protect binding) and then play a custom url on sonos (sonos binding).

/s

I have a Doorbird D101S (the cheapest one, although still not cheap…) and it’s a great product, in my opinion. As others have said above, it meets your requirements.

Also, apologies if I missed it, but with the Doorbird you can absolutely still use your legacy / traditional ‘ding-dong’ door chime. I have mine connected and it works great.

Regarding the ‘no-cloud’ thing, the DoorBird app has a LAN-only option, which means your DoorBird will only talk to your LAN. As @dalgwen said, it’s an ONVIF camera, so it’s readily supported by whatever. I use the Cloud connection myself, and have found it decent, and I have (very) bad internet.

The camera is pretty decent, and night mode is pretty good too. It’s definitely not as good as a high-res security camera, but you can easily make out who’s at the door.

So to summarize:

  1. No issues that I’m aware of (although I guess I wouldn’t be aware…)
  2. Use whatever. I use my Synology NAS, but it’ll work with most things without issue.
  3. Not necessary, but I do use it.
  4. You can absolutely do this, and it works perfectly.
  5. Seems fine. My ReoLink cameras are better, but the image is fine. Higher versions may have better cameras also.

Hope this helps!

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