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- Hacker News
- 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.
by teiferer - 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.
YMMV
by pcblues - 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 clapsby trueno
- This is analogous to what AI is turning into. Pretty soon, some folks won’t be able to tie their shoe laces without tech.by bvan
- 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!
etc.
What a time to be alive
by danparsonson - 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.
by al_borland - 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...
- When I started my search, I thought this £30 doorbell would be good enough and I wouldn't need the £180 Nest doorbell. Little did I know...by vghaisas
- Indeed the Nest integration is pretty solid.
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.
by ajross - >an over engineered
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.
by tamimio - in the age of LLM's this is all too common.
"look at what i can do with the assistance of an LLM"
shows an rube goldberg construction sure it works. but geez support and security is a nightmare.
by senectus1 - 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.
Suggestions welcome!
by vghaisas - > the upcoming Samsung SmartThings API pricing
Imagine paying a Korean company five bucks a months so you can get a notification on your phone that your fridge needs a new water filter.
People really need to touch grass.
by artisinal - My suggestion is throw it all in the trash.
This is absurdity.
by qmr - 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).
by BLKNSLVR - 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.)
by wrs - 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.
by pdonis - 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
by usagisushi - As a guy living in Japan who gets to hear those chimes every day, I loved the website, thank you for the link :)by pezezin
- 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.)
by vghaisas - 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!
- What’s your home local ai setup?by Infiniti20
- What about building something from scratch? Or is it the repurposing you like?by IanCal
- 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.
by KPGv2 - 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."
by johnhtodd - The notion disgusts me. All of my shit is open source and locally hosted.
I couldn't find a front door camera I liked so I ended up building my own from parts.
Having worked for "the cloud" for years, I tell everyone I know, there is no cloud, there is only other people's hard drives.
by qmr - > "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 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.
by artisinal - Criminals don't just rob random houses.
If they are going through the trouble its because they know there is something of value in there and a camera is not going to stop them.
A camera is only going to dissuade crimes of opportunity, its basically just fancy lock.