To have truly smart door, the lock operated by the phone is not enough. You really want to see what is happening near your door. Here comes smart doorbell. While there are not many smart doorbells in a wild I have chosen to install August Smart Doorbell to accompany smart door lock.
How it works: if someone press the button at your door – you instantly get notification about it on the phone. You can open the app and see live stream video from your door. Doorbell has speaker and microphone, so you can speak through phone to visitor. Doorbell also looks for movement. You get instant notification about movement near door while someone is walking to door and doorbell starts recording video. Recorded video is instantly send to cloud. You can watch this recorded video on August app. For free recorder videos is stored for 24 hours. You can extend this period of time by purchasing August subscription.
Installation of smart doorbell is not very easy, because you have to mess with electric wires. August smart doorbell is designed to use 24V DC current, but here in Europe we usually have 220 V AC chimes. So, you cannot just to change button of chime with smart doorbell. After a little research I came with solution to this by using transformer and resistor. This is how I will connect it.
This diagram is missing chime, but for now I don’t use it. This means that when the visitor will press doorbell button the sound at home about it will go only on phones. Maybe in the future I will think about how to connect chime, but for now it is good for me.
As this installation requires to work with electric wires. You have turn off power to doorbell by turning off the breaker of fuse that your existing doorbell is connected to. Double check that you turned off the correct circuit breaker.
Remove the existing doorbell button.
Connect wires to the mounting plate.
Screw this mounting plate on the wall.
And mount doorbell on its mounting plate.
Connect other end of the wire to transformer with resistor and connect transformer to mains.
Open August app and add doorbell to app by following simple instructions.
After setup is done, doorbell is connected to home Wi-Fi network and door lock is connected to doorbell.
Video quality is very good for this small camera. At day or at night you can clearly see what is happening near your door.
For now, this doorbell lacks HomeKit support. For my smart home it is big disadvantage because Apple Home App is supporting cameras. August is promising that one day it will release firmware update with support of HomeKit, so have to wait for it.
