I think there are still a lot of people who won't get it, but at least they can leave you a note!

If they can not figure out the "door....button....bell"  they have no reasons to be at my house. But then again, I may have high expectations.

I know this is pretty old but I thought I'd share my doorbell solution.  It doesn't require a new doorbell or any wiring.  You just need a typical binary window sensor & a rare earth magnet or two. 

The attached photo shows an aeon labs window sensor taped above the springed doorbell plunger.  Attached to the top of the plunger are two rare earth magnets.  When the doorbell is pressed the plunger pulls back the magnetic field is broken.  This is quick but will trigger an open command to your controller.  Its worked flawless for me since setting it up.  The only caveat is that it will kill your original doorbell as the door sensor is in front of the door chime.

Cool idea.  thanks.  Too bad the ZWave door/window sensors are ludicrously priced.

This gives me an idea though.  It would probably be pretty easy to set up a "MySensors" sensor that is connected to the 12 volt input on the interior doorbell using an analog input or something and generate an event whenever the voltage goes up.  I'm not actually sure how a normal doorbell works so it would require some tests and measurements but I'm sure this could be done for very little cost, especially if we can use the DC from the doorbell to power the sensor so that no batteries would be needed.

More research is required!

Quote from: nime5ter on June 05, 2014, 09:41:21 AM
Good thing that's a green button. I'm guessing visitors would find a red button too daunting to mess with.

I don't know how reliable it would be, but I think the piezo knocker project would be a fun experiment as an intro to Arduino + VC.

This: http://www.arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/KnockSensor

Plus some of the code from James's 2-way communication example:

http://voxcommando.com/forum/index.php?topic=1452.msg12742#msg12742

Not sure about power supply (and wireless communication) for real-world use though.

Now that I am playing with arduino and mysensors, I am going to work on the knock sensor.  I should have a working prototype by sunday.

Cool, if you need a serial gateway PCB for mysensors, let me know - I have a lot of boards here.
You can get the board complete assembled if you want. The board size is 38x18mm. We have also a python script to use VoxCommando instead of Vera as controller.


green/yellow/red LEDs
inclusion button
pinheader for NRF24 chip
pinheader for Arduino Nano


A full assembled PCB with all needed components (Nano+NRF24) will cost 10$ + shipping / the PCB only 1.50$ + shipping