Flutterby™! : Doorbells & Raspberry Pi

Part of the electrical rework involved acknowledging the need to fix the doorbell. We had an old wired transformer doorbell that had gotten disconnected, had double-sticky-taped up a wireless one (that looked tacky as hell), and we needed a solution.

So I looked at replacing the wired transformer one, discovered that the transformers apparently draw 3 watts at idle. Well, hell, a Raspberry Pi draws less than 2 watts at idle, could scan a TTL I/O bit and then do things like take a picture, alert some device out in the workshop, and either play an audio file that doesn't sound like the crap bad '80s synth that the off-the-shelf doorbells do, or control some mechanical process (solenoids hitting cast-iron sewer pipe?).

I briefly considered trying to figure out enough of how the doorbell systems work to retrofit with a modern switching power supply, and reworking the Via Epia boards I have on my shelf to do this, and then realized that this could be a two hour project or a several day mucking around with compilation switches project. Two Pi are on order.