[jimmies]

A couple of years ago, I lived in an apartment and made a doorbell repurposed from an Amazon Dash button. Basically I have a daemon that sends a message each time a button press is detected to my homebrew mqtt server.

Then I have a bash script that runs on the raspberry pi board that has a speaker installed, something of this sort to play the doorbell chime:

  while [ true ]; do
    mosquitto_sub --exit-after-first-message /my-topic
    play_wav my-file.wav
  done

One day, when I was out and about, I got a call from my neighbor saying the doorbell was making noise non-stop and bothering him. Turns out the mqtt server crashed, the mosquitto_sub command exits right away... We had a good laugh about it as we are both software engineers.

[netsharc]

SSHing to your doorbell to make it stop bothering your neighbor would be an awesome move

[jimmies]

I used all my brain cells to make a bash script my doorbell, I did not have brain cells left to envision ever needing ssh on it.