Hi All,

Does anyone have a good recommendation for a replacement for a Ring doorbell?

Mine worked great for like a year, but as the servers became overloaded, it's gotten so slow that it's mostly useless.

I'm looking for something similar that I can set up without using any 3rd party servers. I'm sure it has to exist.

Thanks!

I have a Eufy doorbell that I like. It works on local storage (can't remember if there's a cloud option). I like it more than the Ring I used to have because it's faster and the notifications include a still shot of the activity that activated it. The only thing I miss from the Ring camera is that I can't snooze motion notifications for a while so when my kids play in the front yard I get a ton of notifications.

I definitely don't miss the Ring speed issues. It's insane how slow that application is. I don't know if it's a remnant of how they built their service because they were basically the first out of the gate, but it's just awful. It's hilarious that even they recognized it was so bad that they developed an app specifically to get faster notifications/viewing. Have you tried that yet? That could be a good/free way to see if you don't have to make any changes. I think it's called "Ring Fast" or something. It basically installs alongside the regular Ring app, but it takes over for notifications. I think it improves the speed by forgoing anything else that the Ring app does, and only concerns its self with loading a live view of the video feed as fast as possible.

The Logitech Circle View doorbell was released recently and is basically the only doorbell on the market that supports Homekit Secure Video. The Eufy doorbell won't be getting that which is a bummer. I'm hoping HSV becomes more popular and more products support it.

Does that software have a way to exclude certain areas of the image from motion detection? I've never worked with doorbell software before, but all the security camera software I've seen has a feature for this. It's intended for exactly that sort of situation.

Oh, certainly. But these are kids we're talking about, and they run all over the freaking place like kids do, including up and down the front walk and other areas where I want it to detect motion from strangers.

*edit*
The notifications I received from Ring would give me the option - on a long press - to snooze for a period of time (I think it was 30 or 60 minutes). It would still record and it would notify my of doorbell rings but it just wouldn't notify on motion. This was a really nice feature. But it's a decent trade-off to have Eufy include a snapshot of the person at the door for motion and ring alerts. For example, last night we ordered pizza, and when the doorbell rang I could see on my watch that it wasn't the pizza it was UPS dropping off a package. I didn't need to open the app at all.

Thanks! I'll try Eufy. It looks good.

The Ring's notifications are pretty much instant, and it gives me a thumbnail with the notification, but it's like an 8x8 pixel image (kidding, but not by much). I can tell maybe tell if it's the post or something else, but for some reason it doesn't detect the post about 60% of the time. To go live takes 30 seconds or more (the person typically is already gone, maybe I can see the truck as it leaves) and to get the vid it recorded takes 1 to 3 minutes.

I should have been clearer: for me the Ring notifications were instant but opening the live feed was super slow unless I used the Ring Fast app. Have you tried that?

I have not, I'll give it a look. Thanks!

Ok, this is weird. The app is called "Rapid Ring" and it does work almost instantly. Weirdly, it's from Ring, who knows their main app is crap, so they came out with this second app rather than fix the main one. But, it gets better... you need both apps, as you can't watch recorded events with the fast app...

Eufy's still lookin' good.

Yeah, sorry I thought I mentioned that above. It basically takes over the notification duties, and I guess it loads faster on live views by forgoing all other duties. It kind of makes sense. You're probably clicking on the notification to get the live view 90% of the time or more. And any other tasks are probably not time-sensitive so you can wait for the slow app.

But yeah, it still sucks.

I'm considering a 'smart' doorbell. But currently I'm erring towards an ESP32 with a camera. I keep trawling ebay for a suitably bricked Ring or Nest doorbell that I can scoop the innards out of and stick the ESP in instead. But there seems to be a market in broken doorbells, so they tend to go for silly money.

If all you want is a case, you could use one of these:

Amazon

Fantastic! I need to figure out a use for one of these

The obvious solution is to run a Mycroft instance on a Raspberry Pi, with a custom wake word of "Ok, HAL".

Tempting... very tempting...

Particularly as HAL already knows my first name.

I'm still running a 1st-gen Ring doorbell, and it continues to kinda work. Since I have it mounted on stone, and I had only the small hole drilled for the original wires, I ended up using Gorilla Glue to affix the backplate to the wall. So, much as I would like to upgrade my Ring, it would require a chisel to remove the old backplate. A Ring replacement would need to be *really* good to be worth the extra effort.

Sigh.