Most of this is copied over from my project blog but I thought it might be of interest to people here in the forum as well After missing several people knocking at the door it was decided a doorbell was in order but I didn’t just want some annoying ringing bell to drive me nuts so after seeing Ahmad Khattab’s project on Hackaday here planning began on my own Raspberry Pi based door bell. You can find Ahmad’s original Github repository here and Google doc with build instructions here. Parts List: Raspberry Pi Model B Raspberry Pi Camera Cheap wireless doorbell Weather proof Case I downloaded the complete SD image from here and used Win32 Disk Imager to put the image on an 8GB SD-Card after boot I went in and modified the code slightly by commenting out lines related to the LCD as I won’t be using it and have added support for Pushover a service that allows for push notifications to be sent to iOS, Android and also desktop browsers. I also modified camera.py to take two pictures one at 800×600 which is emailed and a second at full resolution which is later copied to my NAS for storage. launch.sh is used to start it monitoring the GPIO pin, I added this as a cron job on reboot. You can download the modified files here. With the software sorted it was onto the hardware starting with the actual doorbell. I stripped the circuit board from the receiver unit and un-soldered the speaker and battery connectors and replaced them with new leads. Someone was even nice enough to silk screen the board with all the appropriate labels. I then connected the battery leads to 3.3v (Pin 1) and Ground (Pin 9) and the speaker leads to GPIO7 (Pin 26) and Ground (Pin 25) for my build I omitted the 10K resister and am yet to have any issues.
My eBay case arrived and while not the most subtle case for the job it has more than enough room to house everything. The Pi was mounted to the plastic board inside with a pair of zip ties and the camera with a good chunk of blue tack. I think I’ll eventually mount the camera better but with the camera board being so small it is a bit of a pain to mount. After mounting the case outside a quick press of the doorbell and we have success Push notification and email with picture attached. Currently upon a doorbell press the following actions are preformed: 1. Sends a pushover notification via the API 2. Captures two pictures. One low res and one hi res 3. Attaches and emails the low resolution picture 4. Inserts the date and time to a mysql database 5. Copies the hi resolution picture to my NAS The mysql entry is used as part of my overall Home automation which includes an internal "overview" web page as seen below: Which you can then click into the Doorbell to see the last 20 entries and quickly bring up the associated picture for the entry. This make it very easy if I'm at work, etc to see who's been to the house such a friend or maybe a Parcel, etc being delivered.
Love this little project, makes me want to dig my pi out of the cupboard Sent from my XT1068 using Tapatalk
Has been very handy, going to add streaming and capture functions as well soon. Raspberry Pi's are great for little projects I've got four around the house now
This looks such a good idea. You should market it as sure loads of people would be very interested in it. Me for one lol
Liking the idea of this, my current doorbell is a el cheapo poundshop one currently, and sounds annoying (but better than not hearing someone knock). I intend to replace current pi B with a pi 2 at some point for running Kodi on, so a spare B will be available for something like this.
Reasonably easy project to knock together and pretty much all the software is contained in the SD-Card image. I would have liked to have 3D printed a case for it to make it all a bit more neater. I made sure to disconnect the actual speaker as I too find such things annoying but I have the pushover app on my phone set to make a noise so I'm aware of the doorbell being pressed. Much more useful if your in the backyard, etc and not within ear shot of the doorbell.
Nice job! My doorbell is, at the moment, a Spark Core (or Photon, or whatever they're called this week) because I was sick of how unreliable the Raspberry Pi was on wireless. Bonus: it draws a lot less power. It triggers an SMS, lights up a series of coloured LEDs on the desk in my office, makes my desktop (if switched on) play a doorbell noise, and fires a relay to trigger the original doorbell so people downstairs can still hear it. The only deliveries I've missed so far are the ones who didn't bother to ring the doorbell - which is why I'm planning to add a knock sensor to the door...
Have you got a build log for the project? Would love to see more about it. I do like the idea of a knock sensor as well. I recently picked up a ESP8266-12 Wi-Fi module which looks as though it would be capable of similar to the Spark Core. Main difference between them and the Raspberry Pi is the ability to take a picture as well. I always attempt to hard wire things as much as possible due to issues like that with WiFi but isn't always possible.
No, although electrically it's functionally identical to the Raspberry Pi-powered version in Custom PC Issue 133, just with a Spark Core instead.
