The part where it worked for 18 months before something software broke is perfect 2020s tech.
It takes 5 cloud services to hear my doorbell
171–180 of 282 posts
Re: It takes 5 cloud services to hear my doorbell
#172I 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…
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.
> Criminals don't just rob random houses
False, opportunity theft is the most common form.
Better doors/windows/locks help the most, and help against both opportunistic and targeted.
Re: It takes 5 cloud services to hear my doorbell
#173Everyone 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
Re: It takes 5 cloud services to hear my doorbell
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a former embedded systems engineer, my door bell is two long bits of wire, a bell, a push button and two C cells. I know a guy who lives is a 1700's-era house. His is a bell, a pulley, and a string.
Nonsense, complete over engineering. I have a door, and people knock on it.
I have an overengineered wifi doorbell, and I've yet to have a delivery where it was used over knocking on wood.
Re: It takes 5 cloud services to hear my doorbell
#175Wow. Sounds much more reliable than a real doorbell & and a piece of tape over the Blink's button saying "-> use other doorbell".
Re: It takes 5 cloud services to hear my doorbell
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> Criminals don't just rob random houses False, opportunity theft is the most common form. Better doors/windows/locks help the most, and help against both opportunistic and targeted.
lol.
the only robberies that get 'attribution' are cases where the criminals get caught. i.e. low hanging fruit and thus these statistics skew to opportunistic events.
however, unplanned opportunistic crime makes for good promotional sales of window bars and strong locks. just like safes with electronic keypads.
very few such devices will stop a premeditated theft... and what is the rate of recovery for stolen goods in most jurisdictions?
Re: It takes 5 cloud services to hear my doorbell
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
Challenge accepted: "Similar functionality" here is the same doorbells that have existed for over a century. Done. :) If the requirements and constraints come from you, then saying "those are the requirements" doesn't settle anything. And is the same excuse people use for the over-engineered solutions you don't seem to like. It is over-engineering compared to a regular doorbell, period.
OP stated it requires a user configurable chime. This is not a regular doorbell.
Yes, and the person engaged with them is pointing out that more complex solutions exist because someone added other requirements.
Maybe “I want a configurable chime” is just a less popular requirement than “I want to be notified on my phone even if I'm not at home.”
Also, Excel is famously complex because, despite most users only using 20% of the features, no one uses the same 20%, so if you want cover close to 100% of the market, you need to ship features that are useless to most of your users.
Re: It takes 5 cloud services to hear my doorbell
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a former embedded systems engineer, my door bell is two long bits of wire, a bell, a push button and two C cells. I know a guy who lives is a 1700's-era house. His is a bell, a pulley, and a string.
Nonsense, complete over engineering. I have a door, and people knock on it.
I used to live in a small rural city, in a shared house where the door was never locked. On market day, there would be this woman coming in to do her weekly laundry. I was never given the key to that house.
Re: It takes 5 cloud services to hear my doorbell
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nonsense, complete over engineering. I have a door, and people knock on it.
I have an overengineered wifi doorbell, and I've yet to have a delivery where it was used over knocking on wood.
Seriously. Everyone that id want to actually press the button just pounds on the door. The door to door people in particular have figured out they can’t be easily told off.
Re: It takes 5 cloud services to hear my doorbell
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
You completely missed the part that the chime needs to be user-configurable, ie. play a custom MP3 file. You don't provide that.
I didn't miss it. I have acknowledged the requirements and have challenged them. What I am stating is that "it was in the requirements" is not a "get out of jail card" when someone says it's over-engineered. All I'm saying is that it's a very comfortable position to abstract away personal responsibility and say "I'm not over-engineering, that's what X wants", but that's exactly how we get the over-engineered Linux-pl…
you’ve successfully over-engineered the whimsy and joy out of their original idea