Arduino Powered Doorbell With Smartphone Notifications

This post is part of the Into The Past series. A list of posts written long after they happened as part of an attempt to look back at some earlier creations and thoughts I had along the way. This post was written March 2024.

Introduction #

This old concept is a prototype for a wireless doorbell that can send a notification on a smartphone. Sadly the C program running on the Arduino has been lost over time, but I will update this post and release it in full if I happen to stumble across it on an old hard drive.

The final version was supposed to result in an encased doorbell with a 433 MHz battery-powered wireless doorbell button and a standalone Android app to receive the notification. At the time one feature I thought would be very cool, was to add a small notification on the display to show whether or not a person was home at any given time. However, it was pointed out to me that this was just shy of begging for a home invasion, and I ended up forfeiting that idea.

The breadboard setup can mostly be skimmed from the video below, but apart from wiring and the button consists of these parts:

In the prototype setup, notifications on the Android phone were handled with Pushbullet as a mediator by sending a POST request to my personal account. The post body contained the timestamp for when the button was pushed, and the smartphone notification would show the time of day.

Demonstration #

This video shows the prototype setup and how the doorbell was working. First we boot up the Arduino running the doorbell software and allow it to connect to WiFi. After it has connected and everything is initialized, it displays a status message prompting the user to press the doorbell button. A notification is then being send to the phone once we click the doorbell button.