It takes 5 cloud services to hear my doorbell (blog.vghaisas.com)

60 pointsby vghaisas3 days ago42 comments

artisinal an hour ago

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.

ezfe an hour ago

It's video surveillance, it makes it more likely they'll go elsewhere. That's literally the whole point of Ring.

artisinal an hour ago

Then go for a CCTV system with local storage for the whole apartment complex instead of a cloud based personal surveillance system.

Then you don’t need 5 cloud services and people can go back to knocking.

HDBaseT 5 minutes ago

When I break into peoples houses, I tend to take the NVR with me.

t098i3 an hour ago

I used to have local teenagers messing around on my property and it completely stopped after putting up some lights and cameras. It stops most casual crime.

artisinal an hour ago

We are talking about burglars.

t098i3 an hour ago

Yup, said teens would burgle stuff off my property.

mathisfun123 an hour ago

People steal things from stores which have had cctv for decades. I have no idea why people think these goofy webcams have any effect other than invading the privacy of your neighbors.

t098i3 an hour ago

I literally just said it solved my problem. Most casual crime is opportunistic, and cameras and lights add uncertainty to the opportunity. Most people aren't willing to chance the camera for an opportunistic score.

mathisfun123 an hour ago

> Most casual crime is opportunistic, and cameras and lights add uncertainty to the opportunity. Most people aren't willing to chance the camera for an opportunistic score.

People have been stealing things from stores which have had cctv for decades. Your premises are manifestly false.

t098i3 an hour ago

It's a good thing I don't live in a store, then

mathisfun123 24 minutes ago

This comment used to say something about shooting people on sight, which perfectly tracks with the demo that owns these cameras.

t098i3 3 minutes ago

No it didn't.

cortesoft 38 minutes ago

The question isn’t whether people EVER steal when there is a camera, the question is whether they will still LESS.

Just because something doesn’t work 100% of the time doesn’t mean it can’t be effective.

schumpeter 32 minutes ago

I’m not sure how it’s so hard for people replying to you, to understand, cameras are a deterrent. Crime is often opportunistic. I grew up in 80s Miami, the common tactic was knock on your front door to see if anyone’s home, when no one answers, they’d kick in the backdoor.

Cameras deter crime. Not ALL crime. Criminals aren’t stupid and will simply go burgle someone that isn’t recording.

thesmtsolver2 an hour ago

And criminals have been caught using CCTV footage for decades.

t098i3 32 minutes ago

Famously the big companies like Target will let people steal until they cross the amount for a felony then throw the book at them

disillusioned 34 minutes ago

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...

ajross 28 minutes ago

Indeed the Nest integration is pretty solid.

That said, the author might also consider installing an actual doorbell, which is a device their home should have had decades ago. You'll also want something to provide power to the Nest, so this is almost free.

VladVladikoff 2 hours ago

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 44 minutes ago

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."

stickfigure 41 minutes ago

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.

cortesoft 40 minutes ago

Is app access really free, or do you have to pay for a developer account or something?

tehlike an hour ago

Reolink poe+frigate

Banditoz 2 hours ago

It's crazy these things don't have much interopability with third parties.

Is it so difficult to expose a MQTT thing or some other random HTTP server, default off but configurable in some developer settings, that could be used to control the device/read state? It would certainly make the minority that is us power users happy.

VTimofeenko an hour ago

Not exactly home gamer stuff, but there are devices like the Axis cameras which can push to a configured mqtt.

Generally ONVIF is the protocol one should be looking for in a camera, it indicates that the edge device can play ball with a central server (Frigate, Blue Iris, etc). Profile M specifies the metadata into external mqtt:

https://www.onvif.org/profiles/profile-m/

cortesoft 32 minutes ago

There are plenty of devices that support a lot of integrations.

However, those companies don’t make the kind of perpetual revenue that bring in capital, and the companies that make the devices that don’t make you pay for their service end up not lasting as long as those that do.

Sadly, it seems that the prudent business decision is to lock your customers into your ecosystem.

vghaisas 3 days ago

I thought it was finally time to write up the story of my absurd home doorbell implementation, especially because the upcoming Samsung SmartThings API pricing means things will have to change soon.

Suggestions welcome!

pdonis 2 hours ago

We have a Ring doorbell that hooks into the actual chime that the old doorbell used, so it still preserves the old doorbell's functionality[1]. I can understand not wanting to buy into the Ring ecosystem (we started using them before they were bought by Amazon), but maybe there are cheaper doorbells that also do that? All we had to do to make the old chime work with the Ring doorbell was install an extra widget that came with the Ring doorbell inside the chime; the Ring doorbell's instructions explained how to do it. It just needed a screwdriver and a few minutes' work.

[1] More precisely, we did until we moved to a manufactured home that did not even have a doorbell installed, after which I had to do some jiggering (now we have a Ring chime that the doorbell can talk to over the house's LAN). But the setup I describe above worked fine for a number of years in the house we were in before.

BLKNSLVR 2 hours ago

I'll have to check the latency of my 'smart' doorbell now. I have occasionally heard the doorbell, taken the obligatory time to find the key to unlock the door to find that it was just a package delivery, but enough time had passed that the courier was nowhere to be seen.

(Yours wasn't a latency issue though, what kind of latency do you get with your 5-cloud services chain?)

Also, interesting about the SmartThings API access moving to a subscription model: https://hackaday.com/2026/07/28/samsungs-smartthings-api-ter... (this link is in the article - the cost is only for third party usage, not if you're directly using the SmartThings app).

artisinal an hour ago

> the upcoming Samsung SmartThings API pricing

Imagine paying a Korean company five bucks a months so you can get a notification on your phone that your fridge needs a new water filter.

People really need to touch grass.

jen20 44 minutes ago

Why does it matter that it’s a Korean company?

artisinal 6 minutes ago

Money and personal data going out of the country is not a good thing.

wrs an hour ago

I have a similar problem, except I needed to ring the actual doorbell. Currently I'm using a HomeKit-compatible video doorbell that communicates over proprietary radio to its wifi gateway that triggers a HomeKit automation (which presumably runs on my Apple TV as the hub) to turn a Shelly relay on for one second to do the same thing as pressing the doorbell button. I think this all ends up just using my internal network, but who knows. Thank goodness the Shelly relay can get a wifi signal while stuffed into that electrical box in the basement ceiling.

(The actual doorbell button is still there too, so it's a crapshoot which one somebody decides to use in the first place. And yes, many video doorbells have a "chime adapter" to take care of this, but our house's doorbell wiring made them run in fear.)

tamimio 43 minutes ago

>an over engineered

It’s not, that’s called a duct tape solution, which is the opposite of engineering, that’s poor design and bad practice, there are so many failure points and moving parts that it’s eminent it will fail. The engineering design should be reliable, simple, and efficient. Instead of that cluster chaos you made, you could have had a relay wired inside the bell that simultaneously trigger a normal and simple electric-based bell, so it works for you and the other person.

senectus1 36 minutes ago

in the age of LLM's this is all too common.

"look at what i can do with the assistance of an LLM"

shows an rube goldberg construction sure it works. but geez support and security is a nightmare.

addag an hour ago

Peak Home Alone behavior right here.

senectus1 39 minutes ago

this is one reason I haven't replaced my aging eufy stuff.

next round of outdoor cams and doorbells are going to be wholly selfhosted.

if they live for another 9 months I'll have the budget for it.

wonnage an hour ago

Not sure if Blink is more locked down but Ring works alright with just Homebridge + HomePods

jimt1234 an hour ago

> ...then it would also helpfully play a sound on the doorbell...which we could not hear.

Sounds like a feature more than a bug.

t098i3 an hour ago

I take it the house wasn't wired for a traditional doorbell and you didn't want to drill the necessary holes in the doorframe and wall?