Electronic – arduino – Software alert when doorbell rings. Doable

arduinolinux

I am looking for a way to send alerts to my Linux laptop each time the doorbell rings to avoid those unpleasant times when a visitor ends up waiting minutes outside my door when I am alone and have headphones blasting full volume, rendering my doorbell-hearing powers useless :x.

Now, I am relative noob to all things electrical, which this project will most definitely involves. My brief search on Google indicated something called Arduino holds the key for me. So, would love some pointers as to whether such a thing is doable, and if yes, how should I proceed?

Best Answer

Take a 110/220 Vac small table lamp, or one of those with clips, that allow you to attach it to thin surfaces. Put it behind, or next to your laptop screen, so that you unavoidably see its light, when turned on. Take a pair of long wires, and connect the lamp in parallel with your doorbell (assuming it is mains powered). That should be the easiest :-)

Even if the actual solenoid is fed with a lower voltage, in many cases (in Spain, all the ones I know are like this) the pushbutton still switches on/off the mains voltage. So, take the voltage from the doorbell box, but from the primary winding of the transformer.

And, if the pushbutton switches a lower voltage, use a lower voltage lamp. The idea is the same.

Related Solutions

Electronic – arduino – Software to control an Arduino

As JohnC says, Firmata is probably what you want. Firmata is a special sketch you load onto your Arduino. It has a set of commands you send it over the Arduino's serial port to read and write the Arduino's inputs and outputs. There's a Processing library that you can use so you can write Processing apps to directly control the Arduino, as well as many other libraries for other computer languages running on your desktop computer (like the VB .NET one JohnC mentions). Even if you don't have a library, you can send the commands from any language that knows how to talk to serial ports (like with Max/Pd as Andrew mentions)

I like the Processing library because Processing is open source and similar to Arduino. A Processing sketch talking to a Firmata'd Arduino looks something like:

import cc.arduino.*;
Arduino myArduino = new Arduino(this, "/dev/tty.usbserial", 57600);
myArduino.digitalWrite(ledPin, Arduino.HIGH);
delay(1000);
myArduino.digitalWrite(ledPin, Arduino.HIGH);

Electronic – arduino – Mains doorbell to Arduino

I would use an opto-isolator between your doorbell and your Arduino. Make sure you get one that is suitable for the voltage and current your doorbell operates with. Measure those values with a multimeter if unsure. If your doorbell operates on AC mains then you might want to use a rectifier circuit as well because if you just throw away the negative half of the cycle your Arduino might not "see" that the button has been pressed.

Detecting that someone pushed the button should otherwise be fairly straight forward. Just have a look at the Arduino "button" example.

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Related Solutions

Electronic – arduino – Software to control an Arduino

Electronic – arduino – Mains doorbell to Arduino

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