Door Bell 2.0 – An IoT Door Bell

Door Bell 2.0 (or DoorBell20 for short) is a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) appliance to monitor a door bell and send notifications whenever the door bell rings. It turns a conventional door bell into a smart door bell that can be connected to the Internet of Things (IoT)., e.g., using the DoorBell20 If This Then That (IFTTT) client. Thus, DoorBell20 is the modern version of a door bell, or, as the name suggests, the door bell version 2.0 for the IoT era.

Full source code and hardware design is available at GitHub.

DoorBell20 consists for two major parts:

• The DoorBell20 monitoring device, which is connected in parallel to the door bell and wirelessly via BLE to a client running on a remote IoT gateway, e.g., a Raspberry Pi with Bluetooth stick.
• A DoorBell20 client running on the IoT gateway passing on notifications received via BLE to a remote cloud service. Different clients can be implemented for different IoT cloud services. So far, DoorBell20 includes a client for If This Then That (IFTTT), which makes it very easy to trigger different actions when a door bell event is detected. For instance, a notification can be sent to a mobile phone or trigger an IP camera installed at the door to take pictures.

The following ASCII art shows the big picture of how DoorBell20 works.

                  [IoT Cloud Service]
                  [  (e.g., IFTTT)  ]
                           | ^
                 Internet  | | Door Bell Event Notifications
                           |
                [      IoT Gateway      ]
                [ w/ DoorBell20 Client  ]
                [ (e.g., IFTTT Trigger) ]
                           |  ^
           BLE Connection  |  | Door Bell Event Notifications  
                           |
|___________[DoorBell20 Monitoring Device]_________|
|                                                  |
|____________________[Door Bell]___________________|
|                                                  |
|                                                  |
|                                                 \   Door Bell Push Button
|                                                  \
|                                                  |
|________________(Voltage Source)__________________|
                 (    12 VAC    )

The following images show the DoorBell20 monitoring device, its connection to a door bell, and a door bell event notification displayed by the If This Then That (IFTTT) app on a mobile phone.

The main features of DoorBell20 are:

• Open-source software and hardware. Source code for the door bell monitoring device and IFTTT client as well as Eagle files (schematic and board layout) are provided.
• Maker-friendly: using easily available cheap standard components (nRF51822 BLE chip, standard electronic parts), easy to manufacture circuit board, and open-source software and hardware design.
• Includes a client for the popular and versatile If This Then That (IFTTT) service to facilitate the development of IoT applications integrating DoorBell20. Liberal licensing of software and hardware under the Apache License 2.0 and the CERN Open Hardware License 1.0, respectively.

DoorBell20 Monitoring Device

The following images show the DoorBell20 hardware and schematic:

The DoorBell20 monitoring device is based on the BLE chip nRF51822 by Nordic Semiconductors. The nRF51822 features an ARM Cortex M0 processor implementing both, the application logic and the BLE stack (so-called softdevice). DoorBell20 uses the S110 softdevice version 8.0. See next sub-section on how to flash the softdevice and the application code. We use a so-called “Bluetooth 4.0” breakout boards with an nRF51822 (version 3, variant AA w/ 16 kB of RAM and 256 kB flash memory) and two 2×9 connectors (2 mm pitch), which you can buy over the Internet for about 6 US$ including shipping.

We isolate the 12 VAC door bell circuit from the microcontroller using an opto-isolator. A rectifier and 5 V voltage regulater is used to power the LED of the opto-isolator whenever the door bell is ringing. A GPIO pin of the nRF51822 connected to the other side of the opto-isolator is then detecting the event. In addition to the integrate protection mechanisms of the LM2940 voltage regulator (short circuit and thermal overload protection, shutdown during transients), a varistor protects from voltage transients since many door bells are inductive loads inducing voltage spikes when switched off. Since varistors age with every voltage transient, a fuse is added to protect the door bell circuit from a short circuit of the varistor.

The nRF51822 is powered by two AA batteries. No additional voltage regulator is required, which increased the energy efficiency, and the monitoring device is expected to run for years from a pair of AA batteries. Note that we did not implement a reverse polarity protection, so be careful to insert the batteries correctly.

The schemtic and circuit board layout (PCB) of the DoorBell20 monitoring device for Eagle as well as the firmware can be found at GitHub. We deliberately used a simple single-sided through-hole design to help makers producing their own boards.

IFTTT DoorBell20 Client

DoorBell20 can be connected to any BLE client running on a remote machine. After receiveing a BLE notification about a door bell event, the client can then trigger local actions, and can forward the event to a remote IoT cloud service. DoorBell20 comes with a client for connecting to the popular If This Then That (IFTTT) cloud service.

Whenever a notification for a door bell alarm is received, a web request is sent to the IFTTT Maker Channel triggering an event with a pre-defined name. You can then define your own IFTTT recipes to decide what to do with this event like showing a notification on your smartphone through the IFTTT app, as shown in the following image.

For further technical details, please have a look at the documentation and source code provided at GitHub.