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It takes 5 cloud services to hear my doorbell
- vghaisas 1mo agoI 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 1mo agoWe 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.
- vghaisas 1mo agoOh our London flat has no pre-installed doorbell at all! This is surprisingly common and everyone just knocks. But yes, there were definitely other ways to solve this problem.
- BLKNSLVR 1mo agoI'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-terminates-free-access/ 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).
- vghaisas 1mo agoIt takes a few seconds, but a lot of that is just the HA polling interval.
- artisinal 1mo 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 1mo agoWhy does it matter that it’s a Korean company?
- artisinal 1mo agoMoney and personal data going out of the country is not a good thing.
- jen20 1mo agoPersonal data going to companies in the country one resides in is also not a good thing.
- 10729287 1mo agoThe idea behind it was probably "Some company on the other side of the world"
- artisinal 1mo agoExactly. I’m not racist against Koreans. I’m racist against foreign conglomerates.
- wrs 1mo agoI 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.)
- qmr 1mo agoMy suggestion is throw it all in the trash. This is absurdity.
- techteach00 1mo agoI prefer burglars more than cameras.
- VladVladikoff 1mo agoI’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!
- KPGv2 1mo agoAmazon had these little Dash buttons about 10 years ago. The goal was you would click one, and it would re-order that product from Amazon. Many were branded. Basically just a wifi button. I hacked one so I could, in my brain fog, record the moment i started and finished feeding my infant by sending a ping to a server via a simple click. There's a bunch up on eBay. Could probably 3M tape one beside your door. Easy solution, esp if it's shielded from rain.
- vghaisas 1mo agoOh, can a Dash button talk to my Google home mini? I imagined it would be the same problem I currently have. A zigbee button/doorbell would work well, but then we'd have two buttons on the front door unless we hid the Blink's integrated button somehow.
- VladVladikoff 1mo agoThis is cool! I have wanted a button I could slap when I sit down at my desk that sets off an hour timer to get up and stretch.
- IanCal 1mo agoWhat about building something from scratch? Or is it the repurposing you like?
- Banditoz 1mo agoIt'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 1mo agoNot 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/ https://www.onvif.org/profiles/profile-m/
- cortesoft 1mo agoThere 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.
- t098i3 1mo agoI 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?
- wonnage 1mo agoNot sure if Blink is more locked down but Ring works alright with just Homebridge + HomePods
- tehlike 1mo agoReolink poe+frigate
- jimt1234 1mo 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.
- artisinal 1mo agoI 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 1mo agoIt's video surveillance, it makes it more likely they'll go elsewhere. That's literally the whole point of Ring.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- artisinal 1mo agoThen 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 1mo agoWhen I break into peoples houses, I tend to take the NVR with me.
- addag 1mo agoPeak Home Alone behavior right here.
- johnhtodd 1mo agoI 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."
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- qmr 1mo agoThe notion disgusts me. All of my shit is open source and locally hosted. I couldn't find a front door camera I liked so I ended up building my own from parts. Having worked for "the cloud" for years, I tell everyone I know, there is no cloud, there is only other people's hard drives.
- DarmokTanagra 1mo agogross, everything I own is smelted from raw silicon that I sourced from the beach down the street.
- fleroviumna 1mo ago[dead]
- whatisthiseven 1mo ago> "I am constantly amazed that people rely on anyone else's compute..." We live in a bubble. Reading stuff here means you understand things about computing barely 0.1% of the world population understands the possible consequences. Of that 0.1%, plenty do understand the consequences and still choose the convenience. For these companies, they just need to convince everyone else, for whom they have no possible conception, understanding, or even words to imagine the Orwellian Rube-Goldberg-like machine that is modern day SaaS. It isn't so much "get what you deserve", so much as society writ large is getting what it deserves for unregulated advertising slop and re-sale of consumer data.
- tamimio 1mo 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 1mo agoin 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.
- DarmokTanagra 1mo agoA lot of these people are making healthy 6 figure salaries and have been told how smart they are their entire lives.
- stickfigure 1mo agoThe 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 1mo agoIs app access really free, or do you have to pay for a developer account or something?
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- DarmokTanagra 1mo agoGo to a party with a diverse group of friends and ask people what an API is.
- senectus1 1mo agothis 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.
- disillusioned 1mo agoSo... 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 1mo agoIndeed 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.
- vghaisas 1mo agoWhen I started my search, I thought this £30 doorbell would be good enough and I wouldn't need the £180 Nest doorbell. Little did I know...
- mrb 1mo agoI am super sensitive to over engineering. For my doorbell I wanted something that lets me play a custom bell sound. You would be surprised that 99% of the solutions out there are complete over engineered stacks that depend on wifi devices, Internet access, connecting to various cloud services... So I built my own: a basic wireless button sends a radio 433 MHz signal, and my receiver is plugged inside the house and triggers an off-the-shelf playback PCB module that reads an MP3 off an SD card and plays it on a speaker wired to the module. No Wifi, no Internet, no cloud, no apps. And the rare times I want to change the sound, I update the MP3 on the SD card. Edit: there are very, very few products on the market designed as simply as this, just an R/F signal triggering local playback. I think the only commercial doorbells designed like this I found were an out-of-stock product, and a UK device designed for 230V that would have required a bulky adapter to work for me in the US.
- engine_y 1mo agoOver engineering is subjective / evolving. You could have bought a bell...
- mrb 1mo ago"You could have bought a bell.." No because similar commercial products were either out of stock or not compatible with my AC voltage.
- selcuka 1mo ago> You could have bought a bell... Over engineering is about the solution, not the requirement: > I wanted something that lets me play a custom bell
- atoav 1mo agoIf you find one that meets your requirements that is an option. Granted maybe your requirements are ridiculous. But I also had cases where I DIYed a solution because the commercially available solutions all either didn't fulfil the requirements and/or had anti-features that ruled out their use. I haven't had any regret so far with these solutions, with some of these being active for over a decade. There may be over engineering, but replacing a bought solution that needs to connect to the internet and someone else's computer to ring a bell with a simple 433MHz sender and a MP4-player module isn't that. Do you know what is required for a device to even connect to a WiFi? That alone is more complex than the whole system the user built here.
- jonhohle 1mo agoI’ve used a Ring doorbell for over a decade and have never been able to get it to work with a physical doorbell. In two different house, with additional power dongle and after replacing transformers, every time I have it trigger the mechanical doorbell power drops enough to brown out the Ring leaving it in an unusable state until I power cycle it (which means disconnecting the transformer in the garage, at the bell, or behind the ring; all of which require disassembling something). I’ve searched for solutions and have come up empty, but have a similar problem to the linked article. My phone is typically on silent and I ignore the notification due to notification fatigue. I like just about everything about the device, but I just want to have a normal door chime again.
- qmr 1mo agoJesus this is stupid.
- DarmokTanagra 1mo agoThere are people in these comments unironically suggesting running an express web server for a doorbell lmao.
- qmr 1mo agoYou'll enjoy this if you haven't read it before https://philip.greenspun.com/humor/eecs-difference-explained https://philip.greenspun.com/humor/eecs-difference-explained
- DarmokTanagra 1mo ago[dead]
- lstodd 1mo agoI wonder is there a market for portable EMP guns to disable crap like that? I mean, it's pretty trivial to make one out of shocker, some foil and a ditched microwave oven and it will kill most any electronics on sight.
- VoidWhisperer 1mo agoThis seems way overkill. I understand that that the OP didn't want to pay a subscription, but a really quick google showed that Blink makes a $30 product that solves this exact problem (not being able to hear the doorbell inside), the Blink Chime, which plugs into an outlet and then connects to 2.4Ghz, not requiring a subscription. I guess $30 for what is effectively a glorified chime for your door is a bit much, but considering the time it probably took to put together this (kind of over-engineered) and the (presumably) monthly cost of the VPS, it makes more sense. Also, I feel like something like MQTT or another message broker could simplify this significantly, making the whole VPS /state endpoint unnecessary, without exposing your home mini pc to the internet, since the mini pc would connect to the MQTT (I think HA actually has a built in mqtt integration? although you'll still need to make something to process the message once the MQTT gets it) and the SmartThings API would also (assuming the processing after the SmartThings API is hit is customizable in some form)
- vghaisas 1mo agoYeah, a Blink chime is definitely a solution. But after feeling like I got a great deal on a cheap doorbell, I didn't want to buy yet another thing from them. I also thought it would have been easy to play audio on the Google home and so I started tinkering and then got carried away. MQTT was an option, but it actually felt like overkill to add an MQTT server on my VPS than just a tiny Express server. (But who am I to talk about overkill here.)
- Arya_xiaofan 1mo ago[flagged]
- pjmlp 1mo agoThe wonderful reality of Web services.
- st_goliath 1mo ago> And that’s the story of how I upgraded my flat’s front door experience from depending on 0 cloud services to 5 cloud services. Up next: How many cloud services does it take to turn on the lights? Here's a hint: https://imgur.com/a/light-bulb-moment-hIKUI48 https://imgur.com/a/light-bulb-moment-hIKUI48 But hey, it could be worse. For instance, you could be trying to send an e-mail: https://github.com/0x4447/0x4447_product_s3_email#what-will-deploy https://github.com/0x4447/0x4447_product_s3_email#what-will-...
- Arya_xiaofan 1mo ago[dead]
- xxs 1mo agoI have got a cheap candy-land made doorbell that's operated via piezo crystal switch (non-battery, non-power-line) and 433MHz freq. It has some melodies and volume built-in, The design is simple and easy to hack (and build something else). There are rather cheap light switches that operate on the same principle and can be used.
- riobard 1mo agowhat's the latency when someone pressed the button and you hear the bell?
- mrweasel 1mo agoI was going to ask, because any latency means picking up packages at a random pick-up point. My office is in the other end of the house, and most package delivery service press the doorbell and starts working away instantly. While that's also a bit extreme, I can't expect them to stand around for more than ~30 seconds.
- vghaisas 1mo agoIt's just a few seconds and a lot of that is the HA polling interval.
- DarmokTanagra 1mo agofor me its (length of wire/signal propagation speed through copper wire) + (distance from buzzer/speed of sound)
- SwtCyber 1mo agoEvery individual product is "easy", but the moment you want two ecosystems to talk to each other you become a part-time distributed systems engineer
- hypfer 1mo agoGood. Now rip it back out again and replace it with a better, local solution. ___ Fwiw, I did buy some dahua thing for this, for which I now run an asterisk that hangs up on every call and switches a USB relay to ring the actual bell. Equally jank, but locally contained jank.
- teiferer 1mo ago1. You over-engineered this, so you don't get to complain that it's over-engineered. 2. Buglary risk reducing when you install a camera is a myth. A very convenient myth though for those selling you any of the components in your over-engineered thing.
- deepsun 1mo agoDude would be much easier to make a custom doorbell with a microcontroller with wifi (Pico or ESP32). With ESP32-CAM even have a video feed / screenshots. Today it's never been easier to make custom stuff -- 3dprinting and even PCB manufacturing can be done as a service, no need to buy. Although I would use a dev board microcontroller for $7, so no need for PCB. And doorbell case also doesn't have to be 3d printed, can make it from wood or metal, if you prefer.
- bradley13 1mo agoOur situation isn't quite that extreme, but sometimes "modern" tech is just ridiculous. For home automation, every manufacturer has their own protocol. "Matter" has just confirmed what XKCD has to say: https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/ Add to that: every manufacturer wants to run their own servers and their own cloud service. I don't want my data strewn throughout the internet. For most devices, there is zero reason they couldn't work entirely within the LAN. Plus, we all know that half of those services will die in a few years, forcing us to replace perfectly good devices.
- graemep 1mo ago> we all know that half of those services will die in a few years, forcing us to replace perfectly good devices That is a feature, not a bug.
- nathell 1mo agoBut this way, you can handle door spam by greylisting the bell and playing it only when it is pressed by a motivated enough person; say, 5 times or more. For an average of 1 cloud service per press.
- harel 1mo agoWe have a Ring door bell (well, 2 of them plus 2 cameras) and also 2 chimes. Those chimes do one thing: they ring inside the house, one on each floor, when the door bells ring. Seems expensive and over complicated and it is. But it works quite well and has been very useful on many occasions.
- CrzyLngPwd 1mo agoI can't imagine how much energy is wasted on what should be, a trivial thing that might run on a 9v battery for 10 years, or, like I had in a house I owned, a door bell that uses no battery at all...just a rope and a bell.
- bharatsuthar 1mo agoMaybe I'm just too primitive but I let dogs handle it. I homestead in a remote Indian village and many stray dogs I look after instinctively take care of my property. There are false positives sometimes but that's okay. I like it when they alert me for potential small intrusions around my house, like snakes, monitor lizards etc.
- sph 1mo ago> many stray dogs I look after instinctively take care of my property Their ancient wolf-dog ancestors howl with approval. That's why we domesticated them after all.
- DarmokTanagra 1mo agoWait until you hear about the data centers worth of cat pictures we generate as a species.
- xxs 1mo agoThe activation, door knob can be trivially implemented with just piezo-crystal pulse and some radio (433MHz). No battery required, either.
- jijji 1mo agotry to get the doorbell to send the webhook locally to Home Assistant, bypassing steps 2, 3 and 4
- praccu 1mo agoI built my own motion activated stairwell lights using an ESP32 and Home Assistant. Works pretty well. So then I decided to set up some LED strip lights for my office with really nice wireless buttons from IKEA. I confirmed that the buttons and the lights both were zigbee compatible, but I missed that one supported only Thread and the other only Matter. So now I have two identical antennas, each handling a different protocol.
- sgarland 1mo agoMatter is a communications standard, not a protocol. You can have Matter over Thread, Matter over WiFi, etc. WRT IKEA, if they’re the Thread-only device, I found one page [0] claiming that some of them can be forced into Zigbee mode. 0: https://automatedhome.com/the-hidden-trick-inside-ikeas-new-matter-over-thread-smart-devices/ https://automatedhome.com/the-hidden-trick-inside-ikeas-new-...
- Fizz43 1mo agoThat's a cool solution, im lazy and would just put a little sign asking to knock.
- maccard 1mo agohttps://www.amazon.co.uk/blink-chime/dp/B0GKR38RPH https://www.amazon.co.uk/blink-chime/dp/B0GKR38RPH There's a solution to this!
- pcblues 1mo agoDon't use web security cameras to stop crime. Every service wants your personal information. Every service charges a subscription. The crime will still happen. Use a physically protected motion action video recorder. No web. The burglary will happen and you will have evidence. No software upgrades. Never obsolete. YMMV
- trueno 1mo agogotta get claude to write the garbage nextjs vercel app that plays the recorded video online ofc you're smart and you tell him to build a login screen but your no auth vercel edge function accepts requests from anyone. oh and you let openclaw run the show and it puts the videos in your free cloud flare blob. you show your friends and family the app you made, you offer to build them one too, everyone claps
- zkmon 1mo agoWe are in the era of techfluenza that suffocates and removes normal ways of living.
- crabbone 1mo agoHere's my experience with doorbells: I inherited an electrical one from the previous owner. It ran on... battery. (Why would anyone do this is beyond me, but it turns out to be very common where I live.) The battery died and I needed a replacement. If I wanted to replace it with something that connects to the power cables inside the house, I'd need to drill a hole in the front wall (made of brick and mortar) and find the closest cable to connect to... And I was too lazy to do that. On the street I live, there are mostly old houses. Some of them have a bell that exposes a handle on the outside that you need to pull in order to ring the bell inside the house. Some have a "door hammer" (is it what it's called?), a decorative, usually shaped as a ring in an animal's mouth, hammer that's attached to the middle of the door one would use to knock on a metal plate used for this attachment. I bought an actual cast iron bell and attached it near the door above the mailbox. What happened is that people seem to doubt so much the functionality of an obvious bell that they prefer knocking on the door to pulling the thread attached to the bell. That's what most package delivery service people do.
- DarmokTanagra 1mo agoI might as well live on a different planet than some of the commenters here. I cannot imagine ever thinking that a 3rd party web connected camera running 24/7 in my home would be a good idea.
- donandon 1mo agoWow. We are living in the future
- jwr 1mo agoI got so tired of every hardware device requiring cloud services, accounts, logins, privacy policies, etc. that I started building my own. I think the tipping point was a phone app to control a Panasonic air conditioner. It could just communicate with the air conditioner over Bluetooth, after all, the air conditioner was never more than 3 meters away from me. But instead, Panasonic chose to build a cloud services platform, so you need internet access, you need to create an account with an appropriate password, agree to data processing, accept the privacy policy, accept privacy policy updates, etc. Once you do all that, your spouse comes and asks for a way to control the air conditioning too… This whole "you need to create an account" is a virus that needs to go away. It should be possible to control a local device without accounts, privacy policies, and other crap.
- steveBK123 1mo agoThe part where it worked for 18 months before something software broke is perfect 2020s tech.
- pier25 1mo agoI had a smart plug by Kasa that I used to turn on the espresso machine from bed. It all worked offline via wifi. One day out of the blue the app required you to create a user to be able to use it and that was the end of it. This should be illegal.
- steveBK123 1mo agoI think I spend more time debugging my "smart home" (which is mostly used for turning lights on&off) than any time saved from using it. My dad had the old Radio Shack plug 'n power stuff when I was a kid and it .. just worked for decades. Lesson there.
- usagisushi 1mo agoEveryone here is looking for a simpler solution, but the real fun is in its Rube Goldberg-ness. Let it bounce around the globe 3 times through Tor, Iroh, Blockchain, Tailscale, Meshtastic, Thread, Zigbee, Bluetooth, WiFi, IrDA, NFC, TransferJet, FireWire, UART, SPI, I2C, and OneWire, using the free tiers of AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI, IBM Cloud, and Baidu Cloud. And it's 2026, don’t forget a game of telephone powered by free LLMs on OpenRouter. P.S. Speaking of chimes, I found this page with a bunch of sound samples from a Japanese company. Strangely satisfying: https://qq-bell.com/media/x-plus-64sound https://qq-bell.com/media/x-plus-64sound
- pezezin 1mo agoAs a guy living in Japan who gets to hear those chimes every day, I loved the website, thank you for the link :)
- phyzome 1mo agoWow. Sounds much more reliable than a real doorbell & and a piece of tape over the Blink's button saying "-> use other doorbell".
- bvan 1mo agoThis is analogous to what AI is turning into. Pretty soon, some folks won’t be able to tie their shoe laces without tech.
- danparsonson 1mo agoThat's a great comment! Tying ones shoelaces without the aid of modern technology is not just old-fashioned (em dash) it's a key differentiator that highlights the growing divide between the generations in the age of generative AI! etc. What a time to be alive
- al_borland 1mo agoNot AI related, but I’ve seen kids unable to tie their shoes because technology, in the form of elastic laces or various other laceless designs, have made it so the skill didn’t become a requirement. I told a 10 year old to tie the strings on a hood like he’d tie a shoe (after he just jumbled the strings together in a failed attempt to get them out of the way instead of making any kind of knot). He told me he didn’t know how. I was a bit shocked, since at that age I was learning all kinds of different knots for fun, and the shoelaces seem like gateway into knots.
- 8fingerlouie 1mo agoI haven't tried it, but with newer ESP32's supporting Matter and Zigbee, you could potentially create a device with ESPHome that Alexa can "trigger" when the doorbell rings, which in turn can trigger HA, eliminating both the VPS and SmartThings in the process.
- dreamcompiler 1mo agoDumb appliance: You buy it, it works as expected for 30 years and then you replace it. Smart appliance: You buy it, it works more or less as expected for 1 year, then it fails in new and exciting ways, and then you replace it with a dumb appliance.
- BigTTYGothGF 1mo agoAs far as solutions go it seems strictly inferior to the classic "a dog".
- sgarland 1mo agoI assumed this would be a rant against cloud services, but alas, no. I do find it doubtful that OP couldn’t skip most of their setup, though; if you have HomeAssistant (which they do), and there’s a direct path from Blink -> Alexa, I’m fairly certain HA could then handle triggering the Google Home Mini devices on its own. Or, you know, doorbell chimes.
- makapuf 1mo agoUltra basic diy solution (with no wireless, and less space that a nomad) but cheap and you can change the sound. https://hackaday.io/project/197279-game-of-the-2313-talking-geese https://hackaday.io/project/197279-game-of-the-2313-talking-...
- kelvinjps10 1mo agoThese services are really hard to integrate. I Wanted to build a script that would use the alexa announce feature and there is no way to do it easily. I have the Alexa because I got it gifted but I might switch to my own thing.
- nunez 1mo agoThis was me a few years ago, but the admin job I gave myself maintaining this stuff eventually got old. These days, I use native HomeKit for everything. Preferably over Matter/Thread, but HomeKit is a requirement. No HA. If it doesn't native work with HomeKit, it doesn't run in our house.
- ckrailo 1mo agoIf he was using Ubiquiti instead of Blink, then it'd be a straight line Ubiquiti -> Home Assistant instead of the Alexa -> SmartThings -> VPS jumps.
- FoundARetard 1mo ago[dead]
- gohyuk528 1mo agoThe virtual light bulb as a one-bit channel is a great hack. Absurd that it's necessary, but a great hack.