Smart doorbells are an amazing tool but still an expensive one (~$200)! Today in this tutorial, we propose to help you build your own smart home doorbell for less than $40.
We will guide you through the basic core steps to build the doorbell with simple components and no need for coding or manual skills. If you’re passionate about woodwork and/or 3D printing, you can of course go further and give your doorbell a beautiful case (if you do so please share with us!). For the sake of simplicity, we will keep our explanations to the “raw” version of the doorbell.
FEATURES
With this project, you will be able to create a doorbell that can:
- Warn you when someone rings it (duh!) on your smartphone
- Use your house/office lights as a visual notification tool
- Send you a picture of your guest on your smartphone
- Allow you to open the door remotely
All this without any special tech knowledge and no expensive equipment!
FOR WHOM? This project can be great for you if you are:
- A tech enthusiast, eager to learn more about the IoT/smart home world
- An experienced home automation maker who wants to add new and fun features to their house and make it even more automated
- A disabled person or a relative: IoT devices are great for people with limited mobility. We receive every day feedbacks from our products’ users who are able to remotely trigger health care equipment, automate household tasks or start unreachable appliances and we’re immensely proud that our work can slightly improve their daily lives.
- Someone passionate about DIY projects who doesn’t know much about tech yet
- Or simply a lazy person!
Here is the final result in video
Step 1: REQUIRED MATERIAL
- Raspberry Pi 2, 3 ($20~$35) // for RPi 2, you will need Bluetooth & WiFi dongles
- 8Gb SD card ($6)
- GPIO breadboard + wires ($5)
- 1 GPIO button
- An old webcam
Optional: Philips Hue bulb (link), MicroBot Push ( link)
The entire installation should take less than 1 hour.
Step 2: SET UP YOUR PROTA PI
You first need to build the smart hub that will control the automation of your ring bell and connect all devices together. Prota OS for Raspberry Pi is our free smart hub OS which is very easy to install. In no time you will turn your Raspberry Pi into a smart home automation hub!
Read More:Â DIY smart home doorbell for less than $40!
