Smart Doorbell

Inspiration

It is common for visitors to come to our dorms here at Penn. Sometimes, though, we aren't in our rooms or we simply can't hear knocking on the front door. We wanted to build a doorbell system that would fix this problem, which is why we built the Smart Doorbell.

What it does

The Smart Doorbell has 3 main features:

1. A speaker plays a tone whenever the doorbell is pressed. Right now it plays the Super Mario theme song but it is customizable.
2. A text message is sent when the doorbell is pressed.
3. An LED light indicates whether the owner is home or not.

How we built it

We used two breadboards and put them back to back with the Arduino between them. A button on one breadboard activates the speaker on the other side, which would be on the other side of the wall/door. Another button on the "inside" breadboard allows the user to control the state of the LED. The Arduino Uno has a Wifi Shield that allows it to send out text messages to the home owner's phone. A plastic casing was built for prototyping purposes.

Challenges we ran into

At first, we didn't realize that some pins in the Arduino Wifi Shield were partially used for other functions. This caused multiple bugs with the LED and speaker but when we found the issue we were able to rewire the Arduino to function as planned.