[rcarmo]

Wow. My most permanent temporary solution is a doorbell extender I hacked out of an ESP-01 and a buzzer. Whenever the doorbell rings, a door sensor (with a magnetic reed switch) _inserted into the doorbell_ closes, sends a Zigbee packet to my coordinator, which then turns it into an MQTT message, which then gets picked up by Node-RED and re-mapped to the buzzer, which gets it via Wi-Fi.

But some of the solutions on that thread actually make me comfortable with the way this works...

[drewzero1]

Wow, and I thought my doorbell was complicated! I used an ESP-01 with a button to send an HTTP request to my home server, which would send me an XMPP message (to my phone and watch) and also send an HTTP request to another ESP01 which was connected through a relay to an old elevator bell, which would flash and ding twice. It worked reliably enough but some times it would take up to 30 seconds after pushing the button before the bell would ring.

Now that I'm in a house I installed a boring old wired doorbell which doesn't send me any messages, but does ring instantly every time it's pushed.

Edit: How does the reed switch work inside the doorbell? Very intrigued by this setup.

[rcarmo]

Electromagnetism. It’s inside the bell coil.

[drewzero1]

Oh, that makes so much more sense. For some reason I was thinking the reed switch was inside the button! Those coils are pretty strong.

[the_third_wave]

You left out the part where the Zigbee packet bounces off a feather which trips a switch which closes a circuit which engages a solenoid which rotates a wheel which drops a few kernels of seed on a plate on top of a pair of scales which a chicken then pecks at which is registered by the scales which trigger another solenoid which pushes the 'open' button on a CD-ROM drive which opens, breaking a laser beam which triggers a paper tape reader which is connected to your coordinator which produces that MQTT message.