Every Apartment needs this Upgrade! (WhatsApp/Telegram Notifications)

As you can see I am constantly working on new electronics projects which often times requires quite a bit of soldering. What I love to do most while soldering is listening to music and no this video is not sponsored by some wireless ear plugs. But anyway while listening to music I pretty much always miss the doorbell which is a huge problem for me because most of the time there is a postman at the door trying to deliver the components for the next project. And since I live in an apartment house which obviously houses several families and whose intercommunication system is all connected together, I can not simply rip out my old intercom and replace it with something smart that could talk to my phone. Instead I need to find another solution, something small and inconspicuous that I can add next to my intercom so that my landlord doesn't get angry and that sends push notifications to my smartphone immediately thorough WhatsApp or similar as soon as someone rings the door. So in this video I will try to build something just like that and since I know that not everyone is super excited about doorbells; let me tell you right now that such a system is also great for all kinds of alarms and triggers that require super fast push notifications. Let's get started! This video is sponsored by Altium and their Altium Designer software that you can try out for free to create some stunning schematics and PCBs. Now their software also comes with Altium 365 integrated which basically connects your designs with a cloud storage so that you can easily share and get feedback on your designs to increase your productivity which is pretty awesome. So like I said feel free to try it out for free by clicking the link in the description. First off I thought about a theoretical plan for this project and as it turns out it was pretty straightforward. Step one is to inspect the intercom system and find a point in the circuit that changes its voltage level when the doorbell rings. Step two is then creating an ESP8266 microcontroller based electronics thingy that as soon as it detects the voltage change, sends a push notification through WiFi and the internet to my smartphone which will hopefully appear on WhatsApp because yes that is the messenger I use the most. And last but not least I will have to see how I will power the new electronics through the Intercom and house it all but all in all like I said this plan seemed super straightforward. So let's start off by having a closer look at the intercom which like many others comes with a speaker, microphone and door opener button. But we do not really care about the exterior right now which is why next I simply removed the front cover and was greeted with a rather small control PCB which is only connected through 4 wires to the intercommunication system. The left two wires are for the TwinBus system which is mentioned on the PCB and the other two wires are for the bell ring button on my floor. I know this because there is a 260 page manual about such TwinBus systems which are apparently nowadays still quite popular and like the name implies use a data bus for communication between the intercoms in the apartments, the bell button panel at the main door and the main control system in the basement. So yeah since they are using a data bus whose composition is not available for the public I would have a hard time decoding that and finding out which data bits mean that my door bell rings. But luckily there are other smart people out there on the internet who partly reverse engineered the intercoms PCB in order to find out the function of these other pins here. And in case you are wondering why I tapped a magnet in front of the PCB then let me tell you that it simulates that the telephone part of the intercom is still in place. But anyway most important are these pins right here which are GND and right next to it my desired ring signal. As you can see this pin is usually at GND level but if someone rings the door, the voltage rises to 5V afterwards which is exactly the indicator I was looking for. That means next it was time for step 2 by finding out how to send WhatsApp notifications to my smartphone with this ESP8266 board that you can get for cheap from the internet. And if you are thinking right now why I don't simply integrate this ESP board into my home-assistant system which at the moment consists of a Raspberry Pi server, one ESP for a door alarm and one ESP for a security camera; then let me tell you that those push notifications are sometimes a bit sluggish depending on how my smartphone is currently feeling. And in case I completely confused you right now then feel free to check out my home security/automation series with home assistant. But anyway I want my door bell alarm to be like this super snappy. So I searched the internet on how to send to the WhatsApp service with an ESP and I basically found two services that can do that called Twilio and CallMeBot. Now Twilio required me to create an account and already at first sight looked a bit more complicated. But after a bit of trying around I was able to send What-app messages which like I hoped for was super quick. But it seems like it was costing me a bit of money; so because of that and the complexity of this service I decided against using it. Now CallMeBot on the other hand was very easy to use and doesn't even require creating an account. By messaging it, you basically get an API that you can then directly use in the Arduino ESP code. And as you can see according to this simple demo circuit with a push button it seems to work perfectly fine at least at first sight. The problem was that it took sometimes between 10 to 20 seconds to send a message and by that time my postman at the door would be gone. So sadly this method does not work as well for me which is why next I looked for alternatives and found this Universal Telegram Bot Library created by Brian Lough who is also an electronics YouTuber. To use it all I had to do was install Telegram on my phone, talk to the BotFather in order to create my own bot that also gave me an API, then get my telegram ID from the IDBot and ultimately use those two information in the given ESP example code here in order to send out a telegram message with a push of a button. And as you can see this method works way faster without having to register anywhere besides telegram so it is a winner for me. That means it was time to merge the ESP with my intercom and to do that I firstly added a voltage divider to the ESP that converts the 5V of the intercom to 3.3V that the ESP can handle. After then creating the final code and uploading it to the ESP; I thought about how to power the it next to the intercom and remembered that there was actually 24V DC available at the pin next to the ring contact which reminded me of a certain meme. But after a moment of clarity and checking in my basement to see the power supply for the intercom system, I realized that it can only provide 34.5VA. The ESP though requires around 80mA normally or 250mA peak which in my opinion is a bit too much of an extra load for the intercommunication system to handle. I mean like I said I do not want to interfere with the function of this system and thus possibly annoy other families in this house. But luckily I had a 5V power supply already very close positioned to my intercom which I only used so far to power my door alarm system. So all I had to do to use its power for the new ESP as well was cutting its USB wire and basically splitting it into the already existing one and one additional one. And that means it was time to finish this project which I did by connecting the intercom PCB pins with the ESP, designing a small enclosure, 3D printing that, reinstalling the intercom PCB, adding a cable duct to my wall, adding the enclosure next to the intercom with the help of Velcro tape, soldering the power wires to the ESP and finally closing everything up. And just like that this project was complete and as you can see as soon as the door rings I get my telegram message pretty quickly which means I will hopefully never miss the doorbell again. With that being said I hope you enjoyed this project and maybe learned something new along the way. If so consider supporting me through Patreon. Don't forget to like, share, subscribe and hit the notification bell. Stay creative and I will see you next time.

Channel: GreatScott!

Views: 1,468,989

Keywords: door, bell, doorbell, upgrade, whatsapp, telegram, notification, message, esp, 8266, 32, esp8266, wemos, d1, mini, send, internet, wifi, intercom, apartment, house, ring, tutorial, guide, project, make, problem, solve, miss, postman, hear, beginner, beginners, twinbus, how, to, how to, diy, do, it, yourself, intercommunication, system, main, button, panel, power, 5v, voltage, divider, pcb, circuit, board, reverse, engineer, greatscott, greatscott!, electronics, overhear, smartphone, phone, twilio, callmebot, bot, library, arduino, code, sketch

Id: ZrkAWSemDC8

Length: 10min 4sec (604 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 12 2022