DormRoom Doorbell

Inspiration

My apartment does not have a doorbell. There have been many times where my friends would be banging on my door but I was doing schoolwork with my headphones in and I could not even hear them. There are already solutions such as the Ring doorbell, however these can cost many hundreds of dollars. Our idea was to create something similar but at a much cheaper price point. One of these units could be produced (in bulk) for likely less than $15.

What it does

The DormRoom Doorbell is a self-powered standalone IOT doorbell that can text you when someone is outside. It includes a speech-to-text transcript of the audio recording produced on the doorbell. We also have a management portal that helps you add devices to your account, and to view past messages from visitors along with a timestamp.

How we built it

We used a Raspberry Pi Zero W and an Adafruit MEMS microphone to construct the doorbell itself. The doorbell is programmed in python. We use a PHP and MySQL backend to store the recordings and text.

Challenges we ran into

We have had difficult with the Twilio API, in that sometimes texts are not actually sent even though we receive a confirmation of them being sent. Another difficulty we have had is that our MEMS microphone is very directional, which often results in a quiet recording.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very excited to have been able to make a fully working project in such a short timespan and with parts that we had on hand.

What we learned

We learned a lot about the difficulties of integrating hardware and software components as well as difficulties in the communication between many disjoint services.

What's next for DormRoom Doorbell

We would love to add the ability to capture video as well, similar to the Ring doorbell. It would be nice to activate the doorbell using a motion sensor similar to the more expensive ring. Additionally, we would like to build out the backend platform for greater scalability and greater ease of device provisioning.