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.
I haven’t had a delivery person knock in quite a long time. Package deliveries haven’t knocked in close to 20 years. I’ve even noticed DoorDash drivers don’t even knock anymore, they awkwardly stand in front of the porch and try texting. I now open the door as they are walking up to the porch to avoid that. I don’t know if it’s a policy or some kind of shared anxiety, but I find it really weird.
I had one food delivery driver call me while standing in the middle of the street. Seemed like he was afraid to approach and knock or ring. So strange.
Some people get really weird if you approach their house in a way they don't like. I imagine if that happens a few times to you as a delivery driver, you might be more cautious.
I know people like this, but would assume if they ordered a delivery that the person would be expected and not a cause of alarm. If someone can’t handle a person coming to their door, they shouldn’t be allowed to use delivery services.
Seriously. Everyone that id want to actually press the button just pounds on the door. The door to door people in particular have figured out they can’t be easily told off.
I used to live in a small rural city, in a shared house where the door was never locked. On market day, there would be this woman coming in to do her weekly laundry. I was never given the key to that house.
Current 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.
No 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.
I use adapters for AA cells. It's just a plastic tube the size of a C cell that you snap an AA into. I have to replace them more often but I use rechargeable AA cells so waste is not an issue.
I would want my light switches to be off when I click a special button at my bed, so when I want to bed I "turn off everything, and make sure garage is closed". Unfortunately two wires don't work there.
Almost 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.
There 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.
You are super-sensitive to over-engineering, so you over-engineered your requirements and ultimately your end product, just in a different methodology and framework.
It 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.
Challenge 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.
I didn't miss it. I have acknowledged the requirements and have challenged them.
What I am stating is that "it was in the requirements" is not a "get out of jail card" when someone says it's over-engineered.
All I'm saying is that it's a very comfortable position to abstract away personal responsibility and say "I'm not over-engineering, that's what X wants", but that's exactly how we get the over-engineered Linux-plus-wi-fi doorbells.
You still fail my challenge: design a wireless doorbell that has a user-configurable chime (eg. MP3 file provided by user), in a way that uses less software or less hardware than mine. You couldn't.
Then I want you to justify why commercial products offering this feature have 10-100 times more code or 10 times more complex hardware just to do what my doorbell does :-)
And you're still failing the challenge of understanding my point, over and over.
The person who gave an opinion about whether this is overengineered or not was Lukeify, not me:
> You are super-sensitive to over-engineering, so you over-engineered your requirements and ultimately your end product, just in a different methodology and framework.
It's still over-engineering to a lot of people, including lukeify, regardless of there existing something worse, regardless of any "it was the requirements" defence.
Over-engineering something is fine. Especially a personal project.
This is was a really unproductive thread to read. As an observer, gotta say I don’t agree with your point. Custom chimes and not having a wire are both extremely reasonable requirements to follow.
What if the default chime triggers some PTSD? (Probably doesn’t, but it could happen!) What if the landlord doesn’t want you to drill a hole through the side of your house and it doesn’t come with a doorbell?
The solution isn’t “over engineered” it’s just “engineered” (not an off the shelf product)
> Custom chimes and not having a wire are both extremely reasonable requirements to follow.
I never said otherwise?
Perhaps it was unproductive because you’re assuming I’m making a point while I’m not?
My point was entirely that other people can call this “over engineered” due to feature creep.
The person who called it over engineered in the first place wasn’t me.
I appreciate that you and other people seem to want to discuss doorbells, and someone else seems to want to discuss christmas lights, but I am not really interested in that.
I am arguing a general point (“feature creep can lead to overengineering”), not this specific product.
We all understand your point: you believe the feature is unnecessary in the first place, without any understanding of my particular situation why I actually need it.
Regardless, this is irrelevant to the point of this entire thread, which is that it's possible to design a device, as I did, that is vastly simpler than commercial doorbells allowing user-customizable chimes.
I never claimed I wasn't over-engineering the line of thought, though. :)
I'm perfectly fine with people having fun or over-engineering stuff, I'm just pointing out that it's still over-engineered in the end. Which is 100% fine!
> "it was in the requirements" is not a "get out of jail card"
How do you define objectively as an engineer if "play MP3" is too much? A doorbell is a sound outputting device only, being able to select the sound seems like a reasonable extension. Is a digital doorbell overengineered when analog electric ones worked just fine for almost 2 centuries? Or were these overengineered when mechanical doorbells worked for many more centuries before? What if I attach a light to the doorbell, is that over engineering?
Or are you just fighting to save face after missing the point completely and making that tasteless Nurnberg trial parallel?
Don't overthink it. If you judge the engineering then you look at how the implementation reflects the requirements, not whether the requirements are good.
Over-engineered simply means there is much more in that implementation than the baseline needed to tick off the requirements.
I disagree. IMO this mindset is not how you make good engineering or good products.
As an engineer (the traditional kind), I don't really appreciate nor can I afford the "not my problem" attitude of doing engineering in a vacuum, because in the end it's my responsibility.
Isn't everybody? Your whole case rests on the insistence that OP's core requirement is no good. Not for any objective engineering reasons, just because you think so.
I have a simple question that any engineer can answer in a heartbeat. Is a Christmas tree light installation with a bunch of series connected incandescent lights (I'm talking literally one of those classic Christmas lights set with absolutely no extra components or complexity beyond wires, bulbs, and plug) over engineered? Could you do it with even less engineering?
Now you're trying to weasel out of this (whstl out?).
I was trying to be diplomatic and use "good/bad" as shorthand for "should be part of a well engineered (not over/under) product or not". You don't like it, then let me use what you actually said: engineers who implement all the requirements given to them are like the Nazi soldiers who executed the people they were ordered to execute. Neither good nor bad, just over executing, right?
I asked you a question because it was an easy way to apply your logic on something concrete, so you can see that if it fails on something so simple, maybe it's not actually useful at all. You pretended not to see it like a fine engineer with responsibilities. Tripped on a Christmas light.
I am also trying to be diplomatic and I would like for a more charitable interpretation of my messages.
My whole point is that "something being in the requirements" is not a shield against something being considered "over engineering" by others. There's nothing more to it.
> You don't like it, then let me use what you actually said: engineers who implement all the requirements given to them are like the Nazi soldiers who executed the people they were ordered to execute. Neither good nor bad, just over executing, right?
And I said exactly the opposite of that.
Doing bad things is bad, despite following orders.
Over-engineering is over-engineering, despite following requirements.
Yes, and the person engaged with them is pointing out that more complex solutions exist because someone added other requirements.
Maybe “I want a configurable chime” is just a less popular requirement than “I want to be notified on my phone even if I'm not at home.”
Also, Excel is famously complex because, despite most users only using 20% of the features, no one uses the same 20%, so if you want cover close to 100% of the market, you need to ship features that are useless to most of your users.
> Yes, and the person engaged with them is pointing out that more complex solutions exist because someone added other requirements.
Precisely.
The Wi-Fi and Linux solution that was called over-engineered just happened to have different requirements. Engineering is a collaboration, not blindly solving very specific problems.
> Excel is famously complex because, despite most users only using 20% of the features, no one uses the same 20%
I think you're comparing 2 very different scenarios here.
Excel is solution engineered to meet every requirement under the sun, for every possible user.
"The doorbell" is something designed and built by 1 person to meet exactly their own requirements.
whstl (the other commenter) insists that he is better suited than the benefiter and builder of that doorbell to decide what is a good requirement and he's willing to make tasteless jokes comparing anyone who doesn't agree with his assessments to Nazis on trial at Nurnberg [1]. You'll notice that whstl didn't even ask why the requirement exists in the first place, just concluded it's wrong (it's something they teach you on day 1 of engineering school, build whatever you want, better if you don't ask questions where the answer might inconvenience you).
When you have a requirement would you take the word of someone on the internet just saying it's not a valid one?
> "The doorbell" is something designed and built by 1 person to meet exactly their own requirements.
Nothing wrong with that.
Also nothing wrong with people going to great lengths to build an Excel replacement that fits their exact requirements like glove, by ignoring 99.9% of what makes Excel … excel.
The issue is calling Excel over engineered for catering to everyone else:
> 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...
Even if all some people wanted was a custom sound on their doorbells, I bet many of those people will want to transfer the sound using a smartphone rather than an SD card they can't modify with a computer many don't own. And, given that capability, even more people will want to be notified of a ring on their phones, and then why not when they're outside (maybe on the backyard) away from the LAN, and then why not while they're at work, and so on and so forth.
The “over engineered” solutions are actually engineered to cater to everyone else, that is all.
And to make whstl's point: I find it much easier to justify internet and cloud to support a doorbell that's genuinely more useful (rings remotely) than SD cards and custom hardware to justify something as … frivolous as changing the bell's sound.
PS: I just spent $70 modding a $20 Casio watch. I loved every second of it.
About Excel, that’s not what I meant, in my head at least. For any 1 excel user the software looks over engineered. So many complex features not being used... by them. But from the product perspective it probably does exactly what all the users need as a group.
Is a coffee machine with 1000 parts over engineered? For home use yes. For use on the ISS probably not. Context is important, take something out of context and you’ll confidently give the wrong answer.
Anything can be considered over engineered if we just ignore the requirements of the user/builder. Copy from phone? Over engineered with wireless. Copy over SD? Over engineered with a controller. Have a door bell at all? Over engineered with wires.
Start with the goal of the device. Do you want a doorbell with a ring you can choose? SD is probably a lower complexity choice and can’t really go much lower. Do you want a doorbell with internet? Add basic internet connectivity. Unless you do it in a convoluted fashion, with more parts and complexity than needed to achieve that, it's not over engineering.
> And to make whstl's point: I find it much easier to justify internet
I read the opposite. whstl made 2 points for as long as I could be bothered to read his comments: that engineers who implement all the requirements are like Nazi soldiers committing genocide, and that additional features on a doorbell amount to over engineering which is exactly the opposite of what you say.
If you don't need internet, why add it just on a "might as well" basis? The feature creep can go on forever like that. Add a 2-way intercom, video camera with IR and floodlight, some AI recognition stuff, local and cloud backed storage, etc. Now you also created a headache to maintain the software or guarantee it will be in a botnet soon.
Always start with what you need, what’s the goal of the device, and how can you implement that in the most reasonably straight forward fashion as possible. Just so you don’t end up with a doorbell that runs Vmware because "why not".
The original poster claiming "over engineering!" is the one that wants to "just change the ringtone," apparently failing to realize that the products they're comparing too were never meant to "just change the ringtone." (i.e. they need to cater to a wider audience to be successful)
I can't be sure about whstl, but that's my only point.
And, really, nothing against going to great expense/effort to build exactly what one wants. In fact, I love doing just that.
Godwin's law was invoked quickly. It's not very hacker spirit to hear a story of somebody putting together a cool hardware solution to do something they wanted, and then complain that they wanted the wrong thing.
> check out my hand-embroidered curtains, it's got exactly the flower pattern I wanted
> yeah well you shouldn't want flowers on your curtains, just buy plain white ones from the store
I'm not really passing judgement on the project itself, or its validity, and I think it's cool. I'm perfectly fine with someone saying "I over-engineered this" or "I hand made this". I do this all the time myself...
I'm just pointing out that "it's in the [my own] requirements" in this case does not really make something "not over engineered".
Is building a bookshelf with adjustable shelves is "over-engineered" because a single fixed plank would hold books just as well? Who gets to be the arbiter on which requirements are the "real" requirements?
It should be considered fair to say that some things are over-engineered in relation to others. This is a matter of (hopefully informed) opinion after all.
Also opinions will change after time, or after analyzing the problem space better.
GP also said that lots of product in the market are over-engineered, so I don't see why my view (that this is an over-engineered doorbell) is controversial at all.
It's controversial because your definition of "over-engineered" is different from most other people's understanding of the term. Most people would take it to mean "using more complex systems than needed to achieve a given outcome", while you are defining it more like "using any system at all to achieve an outcome that I consider unnecessary".
The former definition is somewhat objective in that it can be tested and proven, while the latter definition is entirely subjective and sort of meaningless. I could just as well state that any doorbell is over-engineered since you can just knock.
> GP: The minimum of 5+x^2 is closer to 5.5 than 10
> You: If you were minimizing 3+x^2 you could get an even lower value
> I am not saying every product has to be the absolute minimum, that's an absurdist interpretation of what I mean.
> I am saying that people can call something "overengineered" and "it was the requirement" is not a defence.
Okay, so you're not saying to reject all above-minimum features, but then there seems to be no objective criteria, so who is deciding which ones to reject? Why is it not the customer?
And it's not a does-nothing feature either, it has a meaningful impact on the user.
> Maybe what I mean is: Feature creep does contribute to overengineering. That's not controversial in the engineering community at all.
A requirement from the start, the baseline of the product pitch, is the opposite of feature creep.
You can have any features you want, but people get to call it over-engineering if they say so, and "it's in the requirements" is not a shield against it.
In the sense that people don't have to be right they can call anything over-engineering.
But it helps to have somewhat objective criteria, like whether it was feature creep. And this was not feature creep. And custom sound for something like this is a desirable feature for the average person; you can look at the massive ringtone business in the 00s to prove that.
It is also the right of anyone to call something feature creep, using their own criteria.
> And custom sound for something like this is a desirable feature for the average person; you can look at the massive ringtone business in the 00s to prove that.
And every AI startup should send a monthly Tulip to every user. The Tulip craze of the 1630s proves that.
What a broken analogy. These people were paying small amounts for something they directly enjoyed. And the main reason the business dropped away is because phones made it orders of magnitude easier to do it yourself.
People like to customize sounds. Lots and lots of people.
> It is also the right of anyone to call something feature creep, using their own criteria.
I was listening to your potential argument for "over-engineered", but "feature creep" is pretty objective. This was not feature creep. OP wanted a specific feature from the start and even went out of their way to exclude lots of features.
Since you brought up tulips, you should know very well they were not paying small amounts and the problems all came from people that were not directly enjoying them. Your analogy between them and ringtone enjoyers is hopelessly broken.
> It wasn't me who made such argument.
First off, you did. You said "If it quacks like a duck, doesn’t matter what you call it: it was over engineering." and as a followup you said "Challenge accepted: "Similar functionality" here is the same doorbells that have existed for over a century. Done. :)". You started off actually participating in the discussion about whether the doorbell was over-engineered, and only later started trying to be so abstract and unfalsifiable.
Second off, even if you hadn't written those comments and you had actually made yourself impartial about the doorbell itself, I would still say the same thing to you. Read this again: I was listening to your potential argument for "over-engineered", but "feature creep" is pretty objective. This was not feature creep. OP wanted a specific feature from the start and even went out of their way to exclude lots of features.
My comment there doesn't even say you were calling it over-engineering. It says you were making arguments about it, which you were. You were defending the people calling things over-engineering by bringing up feature creep. So I pointed out feature creep is even weaker and doesn't apply here.
Anyway, I could maybe think you honestly thought the second half of my post didn't apply to you. But your "Tulips?" response to the first half makes it clear you're being disingenuous and dodging. Prove me wrong? But I'm not holding my breath.
> I'm just pointing out that "it's in the [my own] requirements" in this case does not really make something "not over engineered".
You point that out without providing any context or criteria. So you're just pointing out your personal opinion, nothing resembling fact. In this case everything is over engineered. The doorbell is overengineered before even discussing mp3.
Of course you can call things over engineered, but seem to want to include questioning the requirements, specifically also those of the example we're talking about.
Once you start that, you also need to stop somewhere. For example, we could even question the need for a door in the first place. Not saying that we should, but if you want to take over defining other people's requirements, you're putting this on yourself.
So if you don't want somebody else to call you out for over engineering somebody else's requirements, where do you stop?
I agree that requirements need to be kept in check to avoid over engineering. However, I think it's hard to decide for other people far away what their requirements ought to be.
So I don't agree that you can call mrb's basic wireless doorbell "overengineered" for requirements reasons alone without opening yourself up to the same scrutiny that you're applying to him.
> I agree that requirements need to be kept in check to avoid over engineering
Then we are in agreement!
The person who originally called it "overengineered" wasn't me, it was another user.
I did joke that an electric doorbel "does a similar job" but that was to demonstrate that "similar" is also a judgement call.
I am just saying that lukeify or anyone can call it overengineered from their point of view, similar to how GP called commercial products overengineered.
> 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.
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.
In 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.
I 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.
Exactly, 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-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.
If 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.
Your 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".
> 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.
I 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.
Physical stuff (window bars and a security door) is much, much more effective for that logic.
Burglars know they’ll probably be on CCTV somewhere anyway but nobody in their right mind is trying to smash through a security door or saw through some window bars when there’s a house up the street that doesn’t have them.
Obviously there are downsides (cost, aesthetics) but those solutions actually work, I’m skeptical that a fancy subscription doorbell makes much difference
> Physical stuff (window bars and a security door) is much, much more effective
I've lived in a couple of countries where everyone has bars on all their windows due to perceived (in some case correctly, in other cases not) crime levels. It's... not great? I'd much rather live somewhere where I don't need to live in a prison compound.
When I’m looking to move to a new area, I check out how much security the local banks have. The more there is between the customer and the bank teller, the worse the area. Comcast offices can also be a good litmus test for this. When McDonalds has bullet proof glass… you probably don’t even want to stop to eat there, let alone live there.
I don't find surveillance cameras better in that regard. I think physical security can look decent too, like wrought iron window security bars can actually look quite nice imo.
Burglars also know that they can pretty much pose and smile for the camera before covering it with tape and then breaking into the house, and the probability of consequences is very near zero. Unless they happen to break into the house of a well-connected politician or such.
Seem silly, but just try going to the police with crisp hi-res video of a burglarly and try to get them interested. I know people who have done it and all have failed. "We don't have time for this", "Value is not high enough to pursue", "Just call your insurance, not us".
> they happen to break into the house of a well-connected politician or such
The other way round: If the son the mayor commits armed burglary, nothing happens. Happened in Amsterdam. According to her, her son was just messing around with friends.
I recently exchanged with a police agent in Belgium who specializes in the topic. Their heuristics is opportunity of action, namely how easy it is to get in and out without being caught on the spot. They said they do not really care about being recognized, only being noticed and stopped in action. Consequently the advice is to strengthen physical security first, i.e. have a big door with proper locks and close your windows. Everything else, including cameras, only comes after. Imagine you have 7min to get in and out, everything that slows you down means higher chance of getting stopped and thus considering another target instead.
Yes they mentioned that too, advising in fact to act on it. Obviously this is something home automation can very conveniently help with, e.g. if you are away, turn on a very visible from the outside light few minutes after sunset, turn it off few hours later. It's just another automation and you can switch it off when you are back from holidays.
From everything I've seen (which was a lot for a couple years due to my job) there were two types of burglars:
One type didn't care about any security system, even alarms. They would smash and grab as fast as they could and get out. They didn't have a plan other than to grab the first things that looked valuable. It might cost more to fix the building than to replace what they found.
The other type was trying to play it smart. As soon as they noticed the cameras or indications of a security system they'd leave. Lots of videos where a person was detected, looks up at the cameras, and then slips away to go find another house.
A lot of people start turning off alerts or never set them up properly, so they don't notice the second type of video unless they go looking.
Take a walk around the neighbourhood, plenty of houses still don't have any video surveillance.
There's no shortage of footage of people casing a place spotting the camera then wondering away. The smart ones look like they're any other lost delivery driver complete with package in hand. Thanks to the rise of gig work nobody has uniforms anymore. No that it really matters, plenty of stolen uniforms in play too.
Anecdata is not helpful. Actually statistically significant numbers that are not presented by a home security firm. Everything else is just somebody trying to sell you stuff.
You don't need to be extremely bright to realize that it's easier to burglar a home with no alarm system and cameras than one with. And if your neighbor doesn't have cameras, but you do, many home burglars are going to be smart enough to know that it's better to not be seen on camera. I'm sure there are some who have too low IQ/too high to realize that getting caught on camera is a bad idea, but at least it's gonna work on some.
People who break into houses are going for a few obvious high-dollar items. They're not searching for a server closet they don't know exists. They're looking for laptops, pharmaceuticals, jewelry. High dollar, portable items. not a strange-looking device hidden in a closet. And obviously you can put it in a rack that requires a key to open. They won't bother.
I used to have local teenagers messing around on my property and it completely stopped after putting up some lights and cameras. It stops most casual crime.
Do you think teenagers are going to illegally hang out on someone else's private property for years at a time? Their interests and habits are as ephemeral as the wing.
People steal things from stores which have had cctv for decades. I have no idea why people think these goofy webcams have any effect other than invading the privacy of your neighbors.
I literally just said it solved my problem. Most casual crime is opportunistic, and cameras and lights add uncertainty to the opportunity. Most people aren't willing to chance the camera for an opportunistic score.
I’m not sure how it’s so hard for people replying to you, to understand, cameras are a deterrent. Crime is often opportunistic. I grew up in 80s Miami, the common tactic was knock on your front door to see if anyone’s home, when no one answers, they’d kick in the backdoor.
Cameras deter crime. Not ALL crime. Criminals aren’t stupid and will simply go burgle someone that isn’t recording.
> knock on your front door to see if anyone’s home, when no one answers, they’d kick in the backdoor.
So now your front camera has somebody with an unidentifiable hoodie knocking and your back camera has somebody with an unidentifiable hoodie kick in the backdoor. How did the camera help exactly? Is the police really going to find somebody with this almost-invisible stain of dirt on the sleeve of the hoodie? Or are they rather going to say "oh well we'll keep an eye out" and that's the last you hear? My experience is the latter. Now you lost the worth of what they took plus all the money spent on your camera gear and the time setting it up.
Or are you saying doesn't matter, the deterrent is enough? Well then put up a fake camera for a fraction of the price. Works offline too.
> Most casual crime is opportunistic, and cameras and lights add uncertainty to the opportunity. Most people aren't willing to chance the camera for an opportunistic score.
People have been stealing things from stores which have had cctv for decades. Your premises are manifestly false.
Sure, theft still happens, but I don't see why home theft wouldn't be reduced by the presence of CCTV or other video surveillance.
CCTV doesn't work well when people feel like nobody is going to bother to check its footage (e.g. pocketing a $2 drink from a big-box department store). But when it comes to homes, there are much higher chances of captured footage being used and examined, so it may cause opportunistic burglars to look at other houses instead.
The reason why people steal from stores is because there are rarely consequences unless you get caught in the act. Most stores won't file a report over a can of tuna, it'll get chalked up to losses and prices will go up on tuna cans to cover the loss, as it's low friction.
Someone's private property getting trespassed/burgled will have a much higher chance of resulting in legal consequences.
> People steal things from stores which have had cctv for decades.
The crime there (shoplifting) doesn't begin until they leave.
In the case of a burglary, the crime begins when they enter.
Seems to be a pretty important distinction when discussing whether knowing a person is physically present on your property alerts you to a crime in progress.
The claim is never that it stops all crime. The claim is it stop some crime. That's like saying we don't need doctors because they can't cure everybody all the time.
I, too, am very sensitive about cameras invading the privacy of neighbors. But to be fair, it is perfectly possible that the cameras in question don't view anything outside of the property in question.
the only robberies that get 'attribution' are cases where the criminals get caught. i.e. low hanging fruit and thus these statistics skew to opportunistic events.
however, unplanned opportunistic crime makes for good promotional sales of window bars and strong locks. just like safes with electronic keypads.
very few such devices will stop a premeditated theft... and what is the rate of recovery for stolen goods in most jurisdictions?
I 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."
> "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.
I’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!
Amazon 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.
I looked at that at first but man you can’t beat $5. I was looking at a build which was $200 in parts just to get started. It’s also no simple task to build a mic array that is separated from speakers and having a decent speaker cavity etc. my skills with speaker chamber design and 3D printing are no where near my programming skills.
This 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)
Yeah, 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.)
Everyone 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
I 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.
We 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.
I 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.)
I'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-ter... (this link is in the article - the cost is only for third party usage, not if you're directly using the SmartThings app).
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.
So... 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...
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.
Not 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.
That'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!
Don'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.
gotta 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
1. 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.
I 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.
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.
I 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.
I’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.
I 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.
Maybe 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.
I 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.
The 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.
I 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.
It'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.
There 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.
Not 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:
This 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.
I 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.
We 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.
Dumb 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.
These 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.
I 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.
But 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.
I 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.
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.
Dude 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.
I 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.
Our 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/
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.
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.