With it being ever more likely that someone could access Ring cameras or lock me out of access to Ring footage, I decided it was time to leave Ring for the doorbell cameras. I had two, one on the house, one on the shop. The shop one needed to go anyway, the only thing it ever did is let me know the grapes were getting too long. The front door was used constantly, so I needed a solid solution.
I already use a lot of Amcrest cameras, so the AD410 WiFi doorbell camera seemed like a safe bet. There was a Home Assistant integration already and it was easy to set up in Frigate.
Getting it working was a breeze. I read a lot of reports of deep yaml editing to get the doorbell button to work, but I am happy to say I didn’t need any of that.
I used the event listener in Home Assistant’s developer tools, listening to “amcrest” and walked outside to test. It was easy to see both the doorbell event and the motion/person detected events. I did go back and turn all of them off, since I’ll be doing all detection with Frigate.
I was able to create a doorbell event entirely with the UI using the automation builder.
That was all I needed. I was able to give it notifications and Ring chimes as targets.
For the people detection, I already had it running on an overhead Amcrest camera. I used the same automation, changed the camera to the doorbell and added actions to play a different sound on the kitchen chime if it detects someone at the door.
Home Assistant notifications take care of the mobile and watch, passing an image along as well.
There are a few drawbacks to this approach, but ones I can live with. First, two-way talk works, but only with the Amcrest app. You’d need it open or running, so I am just treating it like a doorbell. Second, and even less important, Ring put the video on Amazon Echo devices.
