Convert an existing wired doorbell into a smart doorbell using ESPHome

I use Home Assistant, with hundreds of devices in my home at this point. I spent so long looking for the right video doorbell and chime that I ultimately ended up with something both costly and somewhat unreliable.

I use the Amcrest AD410 with a custom component that polls it (issue 1), with all of the cloud and online stuff blocked in my network, and an Aeotec Siren / Doorbell 6. The Aeotec siren is utter trash and I'm now on my third one; two units had the audio hardware fail, and a silent door bell is pretty useless.

The one I have now hasn't failed yet, but it can be extremely unreliable and get lock-ups requiring me to open it and short out or de-solder the battery connector to get it to behave again if someone presses the doorbell too quick.

The button part has never been the hard part; the siren is; given there seems to be so little, high quality, smart siren hardware available I'd probably build one half of this setup; bell/siren + ESP and use a Z-Wave or Zigbee button to "push" the action of pressing the bell and have HA "ring" it.

Aside: Since the door chime is so unreliable, I have HA set up to announce the door on speakers, and lights to blink in various places when a press is detected too.

I'd then finally replace the multi-purpose video doorbell with a dedicated IP camera and this simple button; As I live in the UK, RMAing my first AD410 was a hassle (had to send it back to the US when it failed), and I was without a doorbell for weeks.

Since my front door is south-facing, the combination of direct sunlight, then cold cycles, coupled with heavy-handed delivery people smashing the button day in day out, basically crumbled the (matt black) casing to dust within 4 months of fitting it. It uses pogo pins to deliver power from the rear of the casing to the electronics so the compromised integrity of the casing resulted in it power cycling constantly.

There are just too many unreliable and expensive parts to what is a simple yet essential function of being a door bell, and the lesson I've learned is that the video functionality is best _not_ integrated. I _do_ still want a smart door bell though for its many benefits.

For the task of connecting 2.54mm “pin headers” on boards you prefer mini-pv. A little hard to search for, but does this require a special crimper of its own?

As a hobbiest you don’t recommend doing your own crimping at all, and I am willing to pay money, but I do kinda need specific lengths due to a tight enclosure without much room for excess ribbon (I guess round cable might be bit better). Is there such an option? I kinda searched for it, and on electronics retailers like digikey I didn’t really see the length I wanted, though it is easy to miss stuff on there.

Despite your link saying they "suck", I've found the light-touch, fully-manual nature of them give a much better feel for what you're doing (vs the cheap ratcheted ones; never used the official tool), and I got pretty efficient at crimping with them throughout my Voron 2.4 build.

Many existing smart doorbells do actually use the existing wiring and chime of the doorbell. An example is the Google Nest Doorbell.

So in terms of "wasting what you already have" what you're wasting by going with a typical consumer product is basically a button that you can buy from Home Depot for $4.98.

Now, obviously, someone interested in this project is probably not interested in having a proprietary Google camera on their door. But in my experience most people who want their doorbell to be "smart" actually want it to be a security camera and a two-way communication device so you can relay information to the person who is ringing the doorbell. Otherwise, what good is it to know that someone rang your doorbell when there is no other information? That amount of information is just like a random timestamp, at that point I'd just keep my dumb doorbell.