One of the things about my home automation journey is that I don’t always start out with a firm justification for tying something into my setup. There’s not really any additional gain at present from my living room lights being remotely controllable. When it came to tying the doorbell into my setup I had a clear purpose in mind: I often can’t hear it from my study.

The existing device was a Byron BY101. This consists of a 433MHz bell-push and a corresponding receiver that plugs into a normal mains socket for power. I tried moving the receiver to a more central location, but then had issues with it not reliably activating when the button was pushed. I could have attempted the inverse of Colin’s approach and tried to tie in a wired setup to the wireless receiver, but that would have been too simple.

I first attempted to watch for the doorbell via a basic 433MHz receiver. It seems to use a simple 16 bit identifier followed by 3 bits indicating which tone to use (only 4 are supported by mine; I don’t know if other models support more). The on/off timings are roughly 1040ms/540ms vs 450ms/950ms. I found I could reliably trigger the doorbell using these details, but I’ve not had a lot of luck with reliable 433MHz reception on microcontrollers; generally I use PulseView in conjunction with a basic Cypress FX2 logic analyser to capture from a 433MHz receiver and work out timings. Plus I needed a receiver that could be placed close enough to the bell-push to reliably pick it up.

Of course I already had a receiver that could decode the appropriate codes - the doorbell! Taking it apart revealed a PSU board and separate receiver/bell board. The receiver uses a PT4318-S with a potted chip I assume is the microcontroller. There was an HT24LC02 I2C EEPROM on the bottom of the receiver board; monitoring it with my BusPirate indicated that the 16 bit ID code was stored in address 0x20. Sadly it looked like the EEPROM was only used for data storage; only a handful of values were read on power on.

Additionally there were various test points on the board; probing while pressing the bell-push led to the discovery of a test pad that went to 1.8v when a signal was detected. Perfect. I employed an ESP82661 in the form of an ESP-07, sending out an MQTT message containing “ON” or “OFF” as appropriate when the state changed. I had a DS18B20 lying around so I added that for some temperature monitoring too; it reads a little higher due to being inside the case, but not significantly so.

All of this ended up placed in the bedroom, which conveniently had a socket almost directly above the bell-push. Tying it into Home Assistant was easy:

binary_sensor:
  - platform: mqtt
    name: Doorbell
    state_topic: "doorbell/master-bedroom/button"

I then needed something to alert me when the doorbell was pushed. Long term perhaps I’ll add some sounders around the house hooked in via MQTT, and there’s a Kodi notifier available, but that’s only helpful when the TV is on. I ended up employing my Alexa via Notify Me:

notify:
  - name: alexa
    platform: rest
    message_param_name: notification
    resource: https://api.notifymyecho.com/v1/NotifyMe
    data:
      accessCode: !secret notifyme_key

and then an automation in automations.yaml:

- id: alexa_doorbell
  alias: Notify Alexa when the doorbell is pushed
  trigger:
  - platform: state
    entity_id: binary_sensor.doorbell
    to: 'on'
  action:
  - service: notify.alexa
    data_template:
      message: "Doorbell rang at {{ states('sensor.time') }}"

How well does this work? Better than expected! A couple of days after installing everything we were having lunch when Alexa chimed; the door had been closed and music playing, so we hadn’t heard the doorbell. Turned out to be an unexpected delivery which we’d otherwise have missed. It also allows us to see when someone has rang the doorbell when we were in - useful for seeing missed deliveries etc.

(Full disclosure: When initially probing out the mains doorbell for active signals I did so while it was plugged into the mains. My ‘scope is not fully isolated it seems and at one point I managed to trip the breaker on the mains circuit and blow the ringer part of the doorbell. Ooops. I ended up ordering an identical replacement (avoiding the need to replace the bell-push) and subsequently was able to re-use the ‘broken’ device as the ESP8266 receiver - the receiving part was still working, just not making a noise. The new receiver ended up in the living room, so the doorbell still sounds normally.)

  1. I have a basic ESP8266 MQTT framework I’ve been using for a bunch of devices based off Tuan PM’s work. I’ll put it up at some point. ↩