Or a smartphone? Or any tablet? we bought a super cheap tablet JUST for pulling up Wyze feeds.
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What do you mean “your hardwired is fried”?
You can replace the transformer for about $15. You most likely can find it near your heater/furnace. It should produce about 18/24V. And, if your indoor chime is trash, just get the full replacement kit form HomeDepot/Lowes for about $30.
Video door bell with Battery Option is good.
I like to see below options in video doorbell
1- expandable: to be able to add multi-door/apartment with adding a simple push button
2- strike trigger; to be able to activate the door strike to unlock the door, active hi or low signal
3- to be able to integrate with other sense gadgets.
4- working voltage, be able to use AC or DC voltage to operate it.
5- i have already made my own doorbell using Wyze camera and sensor for 3 unit apartment and mounted next to Ring doorbell, mine is a lot more better for motion capture however my only issue is the sense bridge that hangs once in awhile, hope the new WYZE doorbell would not have similar issue.
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But, who will keep it charged? You may be diligent…for a while but then you get busy.
One thing you can do is have an extra battery that is charged.
All a PIA. Doorbells have just worked for decades because they were connected to a constant power source…a transformer.
That is still the proper way to manage a doorbell if you want it to always work.
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I have 5 cameras, two of them overseas at my mother in laws house in thailand, works great! I also have one outside camera now, wyse lock and sense, would love to be a beta tester for video door bell, in fact i have promoted wyse cam to my co-workers and friends.
I have 1 wired doorbell and 1 battery doorbell (both through Ring). My back door didn’t have a hard wired doorbell, so the battery one was needed. It gets around 3 or 4 months on a single charge.
I know of a few houses that have no doorbell wiring at all, so the battery powered ones would be useful for them.
Agree regarding battery operated or solar rechargeable options. We don’t have doorbell wiring either.
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I would hope that the wedge or whatever uses the same hole layout as primary competitor so I don’t have to make extra holes in my doorframe.
It should also offer wired and battery options, perhaps with solar built in if that’s feasible and unobtrusive.
I’d prefer a skinny doorbell cam because there’s little room on my doorframe.
There shouldn’t be any components awkwardly jutting out from the doorbell cam either. It should be flat and unobtrusive and not scream “Smash me RIGHT HERE.” to intruders/trespassers looking for a target.
It should be weatherproof from torrential downpours to Imminent Ice Age to Venusian Makeover. Points if you get that reference.
It should record to SD Card, preferably located in an indoor hub so they can’t smash and grab the evidence in a single stroke.
It should have a clear and audible speaker/mic.
It should respond quickly so the owner is notified before the package thief can get away. Or so the neighbor having a heart attack on your doorstep doesn’t expire before you can see them slumped over and call an ambulance. Or so you can kindly tell the unwanted solicitor to kindly take a hike while you’re busy in the bathroom.
It should cost under $99 with a plug-in chime.
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It would be nice if Wyze developed a video doorbell as well to complete the package.
Any users attempt to make their own video door bell with existing off the shelf gear?
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I suggest you read through this thread starting from about 30 days ago.
The video doorbell is currently in beta testing. They have not announced a date yet, but it was shown in a video and forum posting as an upcoming product. They also mentioned a thermostat.
I’ve done this for a while. I have a V2 covering my entire front porch. It uses person detection and alerts me as soon as someone comes near the porch. The problem was that V2’s have a 5-minute cooldown, so if a plant or insect causes motion detected (or another person within the last 5 minutes), then a person could come up during that 5 minute window and it will never let me know. Plus since PD might be going away, I needed another solution anyway. So I figured out a way to fix this:
- To make sure I always knew the mailman came, I put a contact sensor on my mail box. Any time it opens, my V2 uploads a cloud video and sends me an alert.
- I put a motion sensor on the porch facing back toward the door (so plants, etc never set it off). Whenever a person steps on the porch, the motion sensor triggers a rule to automatically record and upload a cloud video and send me an alert.
- I have a device running tasker that watches all my notifications.
a) Whenever a notification from the mailbox sensor goes off, Tasker casts a message to all my google assistant devices to announce through the house: “Mail Delivered”.
b) Whenever a notification from the porch motion sensor goes off, Tasker casts a message to all my google assistant devices to announce through the house: “Knock-knock”.
c) Whenever a notification from the front cam gives a person alert before the other sensors go off, Tasker casts a message to all my google assistant devices to announce through the house: “Knock-knock”.
That set up works as good or better than any doorbell sensor for WAY cheaper. It even immediately announces the visitor throughout the entire house, and it isn’t dependent on the person actually pressing the doorbell sensor. It tells me about EVERYONE that gets near my porch even if they don’t press some doorbell button. “Doorbells” usually want someone to press a button, my system doesn’t care if they press a button or not, it tells me they are there anyway. Also, I can press any alert to pull the Wyze App, then select the front cam at the top. Only takes a couple of seconds. All of this together is a pretty cool alternative that announces things through my whole house, makes sure there are no “missed events” due to the cooldown, etc. Even if there was already an event less than 5 minutes ago, the sensor rule forces it to record and upload a cloud recording as soon as the sensor is triggered, thus bypassing the once every 5 minutes cooldown limit.
Costs for your own doorbell alternative:
$20 Wyze V2
$5.99 Wyze Motion Sensor (to make sure nothing is missed during the 5 minute cooldown)
= $25.99
($40 if you don’t already have a Wyze Sense bridge; and add in $X for whatever size SD card you want if you want an SD card…it’s not necessary though.)
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I did it for my 3 unit apartment building using the camera to see who is at the door, using contact sensor for doorbell notification and the WiFi plug to activate the strike to open the door. I did add new push buttons as I wanted to use the existing doorbell as well
I have a similar setup except I have alexa doing the announcements. Works quite well. Well enough that I may not even get the doorbell since my current dumb doorbell is at a right angle to my door and the view would be much more limited than the V2 there currently.
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I have Alexa too…I tried having Alexa make announcements using webhooks through IFTTT, but couldn’t get the webhook announcements to work (and now IFTTT turned greedy and only allows 3applets without a subscription anyway). What did you use to get Alexa to work?
You don’t need anything special to get alexa to announce a custom phrase when there is a state change using wyze sense motion and contact sensors. You just need a routine like:
If you are trying to use a camera as a trigger it doesn’t work as well since you can only use person detection as a trigger which is much slower. A sensor will trigger an announcement in like 2 seconds or less.
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Awesome, thanks for sharing. I don’t use Alexa as often as Google so I was primarily thinking to push something to the echos… Didn’t even look at Just doing internal routines. I’ll have to set that up now!
I wonder if Google will allow me to do something similar (use a routine through Google home instead of a push broadcast to each one like I’ve been doing). Will have to check that out too.
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Sadly I don’t think this is currently possible for google devices, at least not easily. Google is way behind Alexa in terms of automatic routines IMO. I have 3 google devices in various rooms and only one echo dot so I wish google was better than it currently is.
Rooting a phone and setting up tasker is probably too much work for the average user. Alexa routines are pretty straight forward and can be setup in minutes. I especially like the “wait” command that you can add to alexa routines. For example I have shop lights in my garage connected to a non wyze smart plug. When the wyze motion sensor detects motion it turns on the lights, waits 5 min and then turns off the lights. When the garage contact sensor opens during daylight hours I have the garage lights wait 10 seconds for the garage to be fully open (natural light) before shutting off the light.
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Were you able to set up your GH to do announcements? That would be very useful!