One of the worst things that can happen while expecting a package is not hearing the doorbell ring. Not only do you miss out on getting your cool swag, but now you have to make a trip to the post office—the most depressing place on Earth. Someone must felt our collective pain and thought up this sweet doorbell hack.
In an ongoing project, an ingenious soul known only as “Martin” demonstrates how you rig your doorbell to text you when someone rings it. Martin used a basic battery-operated wireless doorbell and slipped a Funky sensor into it. The Funky sensor is quite small, which makes it a good choice for this sort of project.
Using a bit of coding, Martin set the doorbell up so the systems sleeps until someone rings, interrupting the circuit which in turn sends a transmission to Emoncms, an open-source software kit for monitoring energy use, which Martin repurposed into a sort of trigger for registering when somebody rings the doorbell.
Martin hasn’t quite finished the project though, and at the moment he can only view the logs that Emoncms produces. Martin can see the log data, so he knows his doorbell hack works, but he still has to iron out the kinks in getting the data sent to his phone via SMS.
Now that the basic internet connection between the doorbell and data log is established, though, it would be cool to add extra functionality, such as a doorbell-level screenshot sent to your phone or even by email — useful if you want to know who comes to the door while you are away, or just for avoiding people you don’t want to speak to!
You can follow Martin’s project and his experiments with sensors and other hardware over on his blog.
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