Introduction: Turn Your Wired Doorbell Into a Smart Doorbell With Home Assistant

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About: Firefly Electronix designs and manufactures open source home automation, smart home, and IoT products.

Turn your existing wired doorbell into a smart doorbell. Receive a notification to your phone or pair with your existing front door camera to receive a photo or video alert anytime someone rings your doorbell.

Learn more at: fireflyelectronix.com/product/wifidoorbell

Step 1: Install and Wire the WiFi Doorbell

Wire the WiFi Doorbell to your chime or to the doorbell transformer. If you are wiring to the transformer, you may need to measure the wires going to the transformer in order to determine which ones go to the chime. These will be the wires with no voltage across them.

Step 2: Install Home Assistant

If you don't already have Home Assistant installed, go over to Home Assistant website to find the instructions here: https://www.home-assistant.io/hassio/installation/

We recommend installing Hass.io version on a Raspberry Pi 3. It has a very easy graphical interface for easy configuration.

Step 3: Setup the MQTT Broker on Home Assistant

Install and configure the MQTT broker on Home Assistant. We recommend using the Mosquitto broker instead of the built in MQTT on Home Assistant. You can install the Mosquitto Add-on on Hass.io add-ons.

Step 4: Setup the Automation in Home Assistant

Under configuration go to automation.

Add a new Automation. Under Trigger type, choose MQTT. Create a topic. Something like ha/doorbell/notify. Remember this for when you setup the WiFi Doorbell in the following steps.

Skip over the conditions. You don't need one if you want this automation to run all the time.

Add an Action. In our example we are sending an iOS notification and attaching the camera feed from our front door camera.

Step 5: Configure the WiFi Doorbell

Push the SW1 button within 10 seconds of installing the battery. After 10 seconds, it will do into sleep mode. The Blue led will start to blink.

Connect to the wifi access point named Firefly-xxxxxx

Step 6: Open the Configuration Portal

Open up your browser and navigate to 192.168.244.1

Click on Configure Device

Enter in your home network WiFi name and Password.

Under the settings, enter in the IP address of your Home Assistant/Raspberry Pi. The port should be 1883. The Username and Password is the one used when you configured your MQTT broker.

For MQTT topic, this is the one you setup in the Home Assistant automation. ha/doorbell/notify

Click on save and the device will restart. On restart you should get the notification from Home Assistant.