Door Relay

Inspiration

What it does

A door alert tells you that someone is there, but it doesn’t always make clear who will respond. I wanted to explore how a household could coordinate that moment, especially when a resident might need help getting to the door.

How we built it

DoorRelay brings a Ring simulator camera view together with a simple resident-and-helper response flow. A resident can answer, request help, or mark a visit handled. A helper can accept the request, and the response appears in the shared visit history.

Challenges we ran into

Getting a stream session started didn’t always mean the video was playing, so we had to check playback separately. We also needed to distinguish Ring simulator footage from local demo visits, so test events are labeled clearly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We got Ring simulator video working in the hosted app and built a response flow where a resident can request help, a helper can accept, and the visit can be marked handled. We also added persistent visit history.

What we learned

A useful door alert needs to make the next step clear. We also learned that camera streaming and event notifications are separate integrations, and each needs to be tested on its own.

What's next for Door Relay

Next, we’d add separate household accounts, opt-in notifications, and a publicly reachable Ring webhook integration. These would let households coordinate beyond the current private prototype.

Built With

• cloudflare-d1
• cloudflare-workers
• react
• ring-api
• typescript
• vinext