Using Amazon Echo Devices as Unifi Doorbell Chimes
If you are operating a Unifi network and have some Unifi Doorbells installed in your network, you probably came to the same frustrating conclusion: The Chimes sold by Unifi cannot fulfill any requirement beyond One Doorbell - One Chime. (At least until today. Maybe some future release of UnifiOS fixes this)
The fist thing we have to do is to "bootstrap" our API access to receive events from our Unifi Controller. We use a Unifi-Request Node to set up things.
Then we use a Unifi-Protect node for each Unifi-Protect-Device we want to monitor. Just select your Doorbell device, and the "Door Bell Ring" Event.
You can select multiple Echo devices to speak your message. They speak almost synchronously. I use the "Speak-Announcement" combination, but you can let your Echo device do whatever you want it to do.
If you, like me, have more than one door with a doorbell and want to get informed whenever a visitor presses the button, from which door exactly the alert was triggered, you have to resort to some other software and hardware.
The good thing is, that it is very easy to create a fully customizable "Which doorbell button was pressed and who must be alerted" system by the use of Node-RED and some Amazon Echo devices.
You need the following Nodes installed through the Palette Manager:
- node-red-contrib-unifi-os
This node is required to connect to your UnifiOS environment and capture the events send by the system.
- node-red-contrib-alexa-remote2-applestrudel
This node enables us to directly send messages to Amazon Echo devices controlled by an Amazon account.
First we must initialize our Amazon API. The flow to do this is very simple.
We start the flow once manually to create the cookie.txt file (you can do this directly on your system, but I like a single point of administration) and initialize the Amazon API. The initialization node automatically connects to API every time Node-RED or the flow is started, so no injection is needed for this node.
Select "Initialize" as an Option, create an Amazon Account for the Node, choose "Proxy" as the authentication mode, set up the other parameters - and that's it.
Next, we need to connect to our Unifi OS and capture our Doorbell events.
The fist thing we have to do is to "bootstrap" our API access to receive events from our Unifi Controller. We use a Unifi-Request Node to set up things.
Then we use a Unifi-Protect node for each Unifi-Protect-Device we want to monitor. Just select your Doorbell device, and the "Door Bell Ring" Event.
The event is sent through the first of the two outputs, so, we connect Alexa Routine node there, and set up our individual message.
You can select multiple Echo devices to speak your message. They speak almost synchronously. I use the "Speak-Announcement" combination, but you can let your Echo device do whatever you want it to do.
Since Node-RED can be run on almost any device - I run it on several raspberry-PI devices and a middle-aged 24/7-online-Notebook for more powerful things - this is a very quick and inexpensive solution. Especially if you already have Amazon Echo devices at your location. And of course, you can connect to an almost endless list of other devices, I you do not want to use good old Alexa. There are nodes for many other Home-Assistant devices available.
I hope, you find this helpful in any way,
greetings,
Hafi
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