A doorbell... etc...


Recently my doorbell failed. It wasn't just any old doorbell either. The previous owner of my house worked for an alarm company & it seems that he brought his work home. As well as an intruder alarm system more suited to a bank he'd also installed a neat intercom with the doorbell. Sadly, when the doorbell failed I didn't have the time to sort it as I had no documentation whatsoever. I put a little sticker on it saying, 'Please knock.' It's been like that for months now...

I've been preparing teaching materials for my students based on the ESP8266 WiFi microcontroller & ended up creating a new doorbell when I stumbled upon OpenMQTTGateway

This is a very brief page because OpenMQTTGateway does almost everything.

I bought a few 433MHz PIR detectors on Ebay:



These cost £2.99 including delivery.

They seem to come in two styles. One has little jumpers inside to set the transmit code & the other generates a 'unique' code of its own. They both work fine.

Build the gateway device. You need a ESP8266 and a 433MHz receiver. I've used a Wemos D1 for convenience here. Since I took the photo I've replaced the 433MHz receiver with a superhet device. As well as being slightly smaller it also gives better range.





Next: Set up a MQTT broker. Let's be cheap & use a Raspberry Pi Zero:


These cost £5 if you can get one. Add a £1 Wifi adapter & we're good to go. We need a micro usb card too...

Fire up node-red on the Pi, I use the Thingbox which has MQTT & node-red ready rolled. Design your system:


In this example I have 4 PIR detectors & a push button. They alert me via 'pushover' which is a web-app which pushes(!) alerts to my mobile phone.
It's very unsophisticated as it stands but it works a treat.

Not bad for £25?!

Summary


Let's summarise what is happening here; I have several simple 433MHz devices: 4 PIRs & a handheld pushbutton which has on & off buttons.
They transmit to the gateway (an ESP8266). Essentially they just transmit a 'number' which uniquely identifies each device.
The gateway publishes to the MQTT broker on the Raspberry Pi.
Node-red, also on the RPi, picks up the published data (far left in the diagram above) and passes it to the switch node.
The switch node matches the codes received to known devices. It's basically a switch/case operation.
The 433Mhz devices 'spew' data so the following 'delay' nodes limit their output which is fed into a 'change' node.
The change node swaps the numeric ID of the sensor to something meaningful, eg '14112560' becomes 'door PIR' & we send this to the 'tell pushover' node.
This is a 'http request' node which POSTs our data to Pushover.
& I receive a notification on my phone.


Ian Sexton 2017