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I 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 solut
by mrb 1mo ago
I 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.
- methyl 1mo ago> That alone is more complex than the whole system the user built here. so what?
- atoav 1mo agoYour comment got downvoted, because on this site it is frowned upon to write lazy, confrontative and uninformative comments. If you don't have an argument that furthers the discussion consider not writing instead. Simple systems have the advantage that there are less moving parts. Less moving parts means less chance of failure. That is a trade-off an engineer will sometimes take even if it means building a new thing, sometimes something with more moving parts is needed and that is okay as well. Maybe your requirement is to have a doorbell that does work when the internet is out. Who knows? OP might live in a place where this happens more often. Or they might not and like the idea to never again have to think about their doorbell-manufacturers cloud and the latests exploits targeting that IoT product. There are many reasons why simple can be the right choice and any true engineer would say: "depends" instead of "so what".
- selcuka 1mo ago> If you don't have an argument that furthers the discussion consider not writing instead. You are correct in general, but I think "so what?" was an adequate response (even though I don't agree with it) in this case that actually furthered the discussion as can be seen from your long reply. We don't always need LLM-like, long comments. Sometimes "so what?" can be intriguing enough.
- lukeify 1mo agoYou are super-sensitive to over-engineering, so you over-engineered your requirements and ultimately your end product, just in a different methodology and framework.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- mrb 1mo agoThe requirements are not over engineered. They are what they are. Wireless and configurable chime. They are fixed parameters. But my implementation of these requirements is absolutely not over engineered. I argue it is the simplest and most reliable it could be done.
- whstl 1mo ago“I was only following the requirements” at this point must be the Nurnberg defence of over engineering. If it quacks like a duck, doesn’t matter what you call it: it was over engineering.
- mrb 1mo agoIt would be over engineered if one could design a system providing similar functionality using less hardware and less software. I challenge you to design a wireless doorbell that has a user-configurable chime, in a way that uses less software or less hardware than mine. You couldn't. In fact, if you did market research like me you would find that 99% of similar products have vastly more complex hardware or software or services being them. They break when there is no Internet. Some work without Internet but don't work when the local Wi-Fi is non functional. They don't immediately get back online after a power outage. They need regular software updates during which the chime can't play. These are over engineered things. Not my product, because mine has none of this complexity or faults.
- whstl 1mo agoChallenge accepted: "Similar functionality" here is the same doorbells that have existed for over a century. Done. :) If the requirements and constraints come from you, then saying "those are the requirements" doesn't settle anything. And is the same excuse people use for the over-engineered solutions you don't seem to like. It is over-engineering compared to a regular doorbell, period.
- wolvesechoes 1mo ago> For my doorbell I wanted something that lets me play a custom bell sound But... why?
- tonyedgecombe 1mo agoGP is clearly a maximiser rather than satisficer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisficing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisficing
- sdcfgy 1mo agoAs a former embedded systems engineer, my door bell is two long bits of wire, a bell, a push button and two C cells. My light switches are similarly complicated.
- SwtCyber 1mo agoTwo wires and two C cells? Careful, someone is going to put a subscription layer in front of that
- bigiain 1mo ago"Only works with Juicero brand C cells."
- dreamcompiler 1mo agoI can squeeze off-brand C cells by hand.
- opan 1mo agoIs it still easy to get C cells? I probably would've used an 18650 or some AAs.
- simonjgreen 1mo agoCurrent delivery and longevity still put C and D cells over AAs, that’s the main reason they are/were common in doorbells. And while 18650s would be equivalent to a C, they would require a charger most people don’t own already, as well as the usual liion safety issues. I’ve heard horrors of folks putting 18650s in to nimh chargers with sprung terminals :/ As for availability, they are certainly very obtainable where I am in UK. Shops and Amazon etc have them.
- sdcfgy 1mo agoNo issues here in UK. 18650s have high self-discharge rate so are useless for standby applications. AA's are, well, AA's. So you'd have to replace them more often. Not what you want to happen with a door bell.
- SwtCyber 1mo ago[flagged]
- utopiah 1mo agoZigBee button, double sided scotch tape, Zigbee dongle, HomeAssistant on RPi with a speaker.
- vghaisas 1mo agoYeah this would have been my answer, except for one catch: what do I do with the existing integrated button on the Blink doorbell?
- mrb 1mo agoThat is exactly over engineered crap I want to avoid. I don't want my doorbell to depend on networking or a full blown Linux stack.
- drnick1 1mo agoTo be fair, if you already have a Zigbee network, this is a rather cheap and elegant solution.
- utopiah 1mo agoExactly, if you already have such a setup in place it's basically ordering a button online, e.g. https://sonoff.tech/en-eu/products/sonoff-zigbee-wireless-switch-snzb-01p https://sonoff.tech/en-eu/products/sonoff-zigbee-wireless-sw... then next day slapping it over your existing setup or sticking it on the wall then deciding what you actually want to do with it, e.g. phones notifications, sound on as feedback for mailman, logging events, etc then adjusting conditions e.g different sounds after sunset, dedicated audio if away but expect parcels, etc. But honestly, even if you have nothing, if you know a bit what you are doing with IoT with HomeAssistant if you buy the right hardware (i.e. verified as working by others, e.g. the Sonoff ones typically) it's at most an afternoon of tinkering for a setup that will reliably work for years.
- throw234259 1mo ago> 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... Interesting context you live in. Here in east europe, 90% of devices you find on eshops are cheap chinese buttons with AAA batteries, that emit signal and another reciever device that plays sound. The sound is not customizable, but it is super cheap stuff. I would have to go out of my way, to find cloud connected doorbell.
- kalleboo 1mo agoIn the past 5 or so years, there's also been the rise of the ones where the button uses the piezoelectric effect to generate the power for the radio so that the button doesn't even need any batteries. Just extremely basic and cheap.
- mrb 1mo ago"The sound is not customizable" This is EXACTLY the problem! Try finding one that I can customize with my own chime and you will only find expensive, unreliable, over engineered stuff.
- throw234259 1mo agoThan you are perhaps under engineering. Buy generic button that integrates into smart home, and trigger sounds on your home theater. Or buy 5, and decide which tone you like most.
- DarmokTanagra 1mo agoPretty sure I have inherited some of your codebases.
- everdrive 1mo agoAlmost any smart product these days starts with a couple of basic assumptions: - All consumers own smartphones and like using them - Consumers have no idea how their home networking works - Consumers could not move a file from their computer to an SD card (or something similar) So, everything is done by the app: you install the app, the smart device broadcasts a wifi network. This allows you to use your phone to give the smart device your wifi password. Then the remote servers handle everything else. There's nothing in between. You're either an actual engineer, as mrb describes, or you're just beholden to cloud services that are terrible and also are guaranteed to disappear in 0-3 years.
- rtkwe 1mo agoThere are some intermediates but they're often not that well supported. I have a door bell with a traditional app but it also exposes a normal IP camera stream and has a community (I assume) home assistant integration that lets me perform actions when one of the doorbells not connected directly to a chime trigger.
- edude03 1mo agoI think as a hacker/engineer type you’re more aware of what’s possible and because of that you expect more from things in your life. The flip side of that is that it makes features most people would never think of feel like table stakes and combined with the ability to build your own solution - IMO leads to over engineering.