I think personally, I'd go with a simple Zigbee or Z-Wave push-button if (when) I were to re-do my doorbell setup.
I use Home Assistant, with hundreds of devices in my home at this point. I spent so long looking for the right video doorbell and chime that I ultimately ended up with something both costly and somewhat unreliable.
I use the Amcrest AD410 with a custom component that polls it (issue 1), with all of the cloud and online stuff blocked in my network, and an Aeotec Siren / Doorbell 6. The Aeotec siren is utter trash and I'm now on my third one; two units had the audio hardware fail, and a silent door bell is pretty useless.
The one I have now hasn't failed yet, but it can be extremely unreliable and get lock-ups requiring me to open it and short out or de-solder the battery connector to get it to behave again if someone presses the doorbell too quick.
The button part has never been the hard part; the siren is; given there seems to be so little, high quality, smart siren hardware available I'd probably build one half of this setup; bell/siren + ESP and use a Z-Wave or Zigbee button to "push" the action of pressing the bell and have HA "ring" it.
Aside: Since the door chime is so unreliable, I have HA set up to announce the door on speakers, and lights to blink in various places when a press is detected too.
I'd then finally replace the multi-purpose video doorbell with a dedicated IP camera and this simple button; As I live in the UK, RMAing my first AD410 was a hassle (had to send it back to the US when it failed), and I was without a doorbell for weeks.
Since my front door is south-facing, the combination of direct sunlight, then cold cycles, coupled with heavy-handed delivery people smashing the button day in day out, basically crumbled the (matt black) casing to dust within 4 months of fitting it. It uses pogo pins to deliver power from the rear of the casing to the electronics so the compromised integrity of the casing resulted in it power cycling constantly.
There are just too many unreliable and expensive parts to what is a simple yet essential function of being a door bell, and the lesson I've learned is that the video functionality is best _not_ integrated. I _do_ still want a smart door bell though for its many benefits.
Can you tell me some more about that? I currently use ESPHome for a bunch of devices, but the automations they use are all driven through Home Assistant.
Is there a way to link devices directly over the WiFi with ESPHome?
EDIT: I think I understand what you meant now; not specifically ESPHome, but the nature of the deployment in the OP takes the "smarts" out of the critical path, allowing it to fall back to being an electro-mechanically actuated doorbell. This is certainly ideal, but I don't have anywhere I can place/power a chime near the doorbell hence the desire for a wireless connection between them. Would be great if I could somehow link two ESPHome devices wirelessly without the server so they can communicate if it's down (I suppose I could with an REST API if nothing else).
Interesting. They seem to warn against using the server for much as it's resource hungry and potentially unreliable, but that appears to be focused on the task of serving data; a simple webhook type use should be safer.
It'd be pretty amazing if ESPHome supported something like ZeroMQ[0], so you could talk between nodes in anything up-to full-mesh at a socket-level and not need to worry about the availability of a server to manage the traffic.
I use Home Assistant, with hundreds of devices in my home at this point. I spent so long looking for the right video doorbell and chime that I ultimately ended up with something both costly and somewhat unreliable.
I use the Amcrest AD410 with a custom component that polls it (issue 1), with all of the cloud and online stuff blocked in my network, and an Aeotec Siren / Doorbell 6. The Aeotec siren is utter trash and I'm now on my third one; two units had the audio hardware fail, and a silent door bell is pretty useless.
The one I have now hasn't failed yet, but it can be extremely unreliable and get lock-ups requiring me to open it and short out or de-solder the battery connector to get it to behave again if someone presses the doorbell too quick.
The button part has never been the hard part; the siren is; given there seems to be so little, high quality, smart siren hardware available I'd probably build one half of this setup; bell/siren + ESP and use a Z-Wave or Zigbee button to "push" the action of pressing the bell and have HA "ring" it.
Aside: Since the door chime is so unreliable, I have HA set up to announce the door on speakers, and lights to blink in various places when a press is detected too.
I'd then finally replace the multi-purpose video doorbell with a dedicated IP camera and this simple button; As I live in the UK, RMAing my first AD410 was a hassle (had to send it back to the US when it failed), and I was without a doorbell for weeks.
Since my front door is south-facing, the combination of direct sunlight, then cold cycles, coupled with heavy-handed delivery people smashing the button day in day out, basically crumbled the (matt black) casing to dust within 4 months of fitting it. It uses pogo pins to deliver power from the rear of the casing to the electronics so the compromised integrity of the casing resulted in it power cycling constantly.
There are just too many unreliable and expensive parts to what is a simple yet essential function of being a door bell, and the lesson I've learned is that the video functionality is best _not_ integrated. I _do_ still want a smart door bell though for its many benefits.