Making a doorbell with Philips Hue

Using Philips Hue to create a doorbell that does not rely on sound!

I found my myself experiencing perhaps an odd problem to some, maybe even a first world problem to others. I think we are all familiar with active noise cancelling headphones, brilliant things. The premise being that there’s microphones on the headphones that take in the ambient noise and then the headphones create their own white noise to counter the ambient noise. Thus, you get near silence besides the music you are playing, fantastic. Not that my music is exceptionally loud these days, but one you get used to it, it is extremely hard to notice noise external to the headphones.

Take for example, someone knocking on the door. I will be at my desk, listening to music and either working on something or playing a game, completely in the zone. One of my parents could be knocking at the door and I would not hear them. Inevitably they need to just open the door in a spectacular fashion, and I jump out a little of my chair, pulling off the headphones so I can talk to them. I do not think the spectacular fashion is good for blood pressure. It also sorts of rips me away from being in the zone on a side project which is a lot harder to get back in to then.

The problem of having a guest at your door and they need your attention, so you let them inside has been solved for quite a while now. Knockers on the door, doorbells that play classic jingles to just the individual rapping their knuckles against the door. So, I do not need to reinvent the wheel here, but all these solutions rely on generating noise which when paired with active noise cancelling headphones, make the generations-based solution a lot harder to do. I inevitably decided to go a route of changing the sensory output of the solution to the having a guest at your door problem from an audio output to a visual output.

Philips Hue if you do not know already, is one of the larger brands when it comes to smart lighting. I have been using it for around two or so years now, I think. It has mainly been just scoped to my bedroom and bathroom since I do not own a house yet, but I’ve done quite a bit with it. I mainly control my lights with my voice via Alexa, but I also have used a sensor in the past when controlling a bathroom light. This was neat since depending on the time of day, the sensor would set the light to a specific level. So a winter evening may turn it on to near maximum but if I stumble out of bed at three in the morning to use the bathroom, it would set it to a very low level so I can at least see where I’m going but not get completely woken up by the light. Hue have a multitude of accessories, including a Smart button which not only is a great a replacement for voice control, but is also how I pulled off my visual doorbell.

The smart button comes within its own unit that does have an adhesive side if you so choose to use it. In this case, I was basically mounting the switch to the door, so it was certainly needed. Once I got it on there, it was just a matter of adding it to my setup (I’ve the bridge, so it is all done via Zigbee) and configuring what light or lights I wanted to use. I have always been one to use lamps for my primary source of light and not the standard light on the ceiling. So that was an excellent choice to use for the doorbell since it is unfamiliar. Bing bang bong, I have got a visual doorbell! It definitely has some shortfalls, I don’t think in the context of a bright summers day that it may be that noticeable, but perhaps a different colour lightbulb than standard white may be useful (you can configure what light turns on based on time of day). But so far anyway, it has worked quite well, and I probably would not need it if my parents just sent me a text instead rather than coming upstairs. But hey, necessity is the mother of all invention!