alt.hn

3/23/2026 at 12:42:00 PM

Box of Secrets: Discreetly modding an apartment intercom to work with Apple Home

 https://www.jackhogan.me/blog/box-of-secrets/

by jackhogan11

3/24/2026 at 9:42:30 AM

I have a similar Apple HomeKit integration to my apartment door system in a much simpler way;

When you buzz the apartment from the intercom it connects to a dedicated landline phone, That landline is setup to automatically go straight to voicemail, and then the voicemail message is just a recording of the tone required to open the door.

Then I have a smart power socket that the landline phone gets its power from - which I can toggle in the home app.

So if you turn on the power socket and dial the apartment code at the entrance, it buzzes you straight in. Or turn the power socket off and it doesn't.

by robjampar

3/24/2026 at 6:09:13 AM

I had the same problem and I've searched for ready made solutions for over an year before I found a guy that reverse-engineers and builds ready-made boards to install in my intercom for less than 30 euro.

I'm unsure if I should post the link or not as it's specific to Romania, but I love how janky the buids are: https://www.olx.ro/d/oferta/automatizare-interfon-electra-cu...

by FlorinSays

3/24/2026 at 9:18:31 AM

Some years ago I had an older analog intercom and added some intelligence for the open button, ignoring the audio part. Doing it with an ESP01 was trivial and I only needed access to my intercom box inside the apartment. The first issue I ran into was that no matter how much I optimized, the power consumption was high and made the thing semi-useless. Then I got smarter and powered it from the 24V lines coming from the intercom system. That worked great until I realized that where I live this counts as stealing electricity so I scratched that, why take the chance that the building administrator notices something and I get burned.

Eventually I got a Nuki Opener which works with all kinds of intercoms and is way less effort. Janky builds are awesome but better for the playground than as a solution you really want to be reliable for the whole family.

P.S. The code from the article should be linked more prominently [0], for anyone who wants to tinker.

[0] https://github.com/ImTheSquid/doorbell2

by close04

3/24/2026 at 10:20:15 AM

I built something similar! https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2021-03-13-smart-interco...

> I bought the cheapest compatible BTicino intercom device (BT 344232 for 32 €) that I could find on eBay, then soldered in 4 wires and added microcontrollers to make it smart. It now connects to my Nuki Opener Smart Intercom IOT device, and to my local MQTT Pub/Sub bus (why not?).

by secure

3/24/2026 at 9:55:44 AM

This reminds me of another annoyance I have. We have a wall mounted thermostat using batteries at the cabin. It controls how much water is let through from the central heating to the floors by sending some radio signal. I would like to be able to control this remotely, for instance to turn on heating a day before arrival. But the only way to do this is to buy a new unit connected to the pipes as well and upgrade the whole thing, which was quoted like $2k++ and need their app and their subscription. But why can't something just mimic the radio signals? That already works today! Why do I have to rebuild the whole heating setup for this? So stupid when technology locks you in without need.

I'm tempted to have a remote controlled screw driver that can twist the knob remotely or something.

by matsemann

3/24/2026 at 10:33:32 AM

There are often controllers which do indeed just mimic the signals. Doesn't work with every appliance, it depends on the way it's implement and if the manufacturer wanted to make that approach infeasible.

But there absolutely are options to record such Signals and then replicate them via home assistant - I used them before to control a ceiling fan and various infrared devices (same idea, but not a radio there instead a "blaster" - I think it was called)

I didn't set it up again after my last move though, as I couldn't mount the ceiling fan in this apartment and the Infrared devices were just my media center (tv, audio), which are hardly in use currently

by ffsm8

3/24/2026 at 10:13:13 AM

Take a look at SwitchBot. They have a device that can tap buttons to solve these kinds of problems. They also have a device for tilting blinds by twisting the rod, which could maybe be modified to twist a knob.

by kapep

3/24/2026 at 10:23:10 AM

I know some cabins are quite remote but do you have a trusted neighbour who would do it for a case of beer?

My mum's neighbours buy milk and bread and turn the heating on! I don't quite trust my own neighbour to do that but it's awesome for her

by gib444

3/24/2026 at 10:45:44 AM

I like your approach, it's one I try to use at work as well. Not every problem is a tech problem, many things can be fixed by just talking to humans or changing the process.

In my case the cabin is actually in the town where I grew up, and used as a way to be closer to home and family without overstaying my welcome and also be a bit more free when here (heh). So I do have family that now helps with this, it was mostly in a "can I pay a little not inconvenience them". I arrived here sunday with the heat on and some easter eggs and bunnies on the table put there by my mother, so it's not all bad. :)

by matsemann

3/24/2026 at 5:24:30 AM

I’m actually pretty surprised how bad the intercom ecosystem is these days.

Why aren’t there more ‘semi dumb’ Ethernet or wifi products that just let you announce that dinner is ready? It doesn’t need to be a fully ruggedised commercial system like this one or a fully integrated cloud managed solution like ring.

The cheap no name wireless ones can’t handle comms between rooms, let alone across a house.

The security implications aren’t insurmountable - you could use pairing codes if there are multiple on the network.

I’ve accepted that it’s a niche market, and that the only solution is to use Asterix with a some cheapo voip phones.

by greggsy

3/24/2026 at 5:57:41 AM

Apple's HomePod Mini and Google Home and Alexa all support intercom modes. I'd presume they typically handle the home case for the majority of folks.

by unsnap_biceps

3/24/2026 at 7:44:03 AM

HomePod Mini is a waste of money, unless you like screaming at your dumb robot that never understands what you want it to do

Setting timers works well though

by pprotas

3/24/2026 at 10:11:58 AM

HomePod Mini is primarily a speaker you can AirPlay to which happens to have some basic voice control functionality. I'd really love them to be a bit more usable (in particular I want to be able to change the app it sends reminders to) but my experience has been that they're fine for music, timers, and basic smart home control.

by jon-wood

3/24/2026 at 8:51:47 AM

+1 to this we had a set of HomePod minis for intercom and not only do they not work reliably, but the diagnostics provided when they fail are non-existent, making it hard to improve the setup.

by raesene9

3/24/2026 at 9:20:35 AM

> Setting timers works well though

This is Siri’s primary use case, at least I assume so based on my experience.

As long as the timer isn’t for 50 minutes.

by nkrisc

3/24/2026 at 11:09:41 AM

Or between 13 and 19 which intermittently is interpreted as 30 or 40 etc. Maybe it's just my enunciation.

by mrloop

3/24/2026 at 8:30:26 AM

They're nice little speakers that also do well when controlling things through Apple Home, setting alarms, timers, reminders etc.

I'd love to know the % of Alexa Dots (whatever the small ones are called now) that are used for anything more than this.

by samcolson42

3/24/2026 at 9:16:48 AM

I have one for settings timers when cooking and playing music.

Maybe I'm just not creative enough, but I don't see anything else I would want it to do.

by FinnKuhn

3/24/2026 at 6:34:23 AM

We have Google Home Minis in every room and the screens in bedroom and kitchen and the only thing that works reliably to message intra-room is to say "Hey Google, broadcast message" because half of the time it will tell me it can't send messages yet. If someone knows what I'm doing wrong I'd love to hear it since this would be a great feature.

To be honest, I'm honestly sick of Google Home's approach to this since the Gemini update has turned everything really slow and I'm getting close to the point where I'd rather home-roll a full system myself that works reliably instead of the crapshoot that this is. Home Assistant seems to have a functionality bridge to Google Home connected devices like my blinds or cameras so I should be able to retain the edge devices but I have half a mind to just dump the whole thing and start over.

by arjie

3/24/2026 at 9:04:39 AM

The Home Assistant Voice will let you do whatever. I wrote a small server that accepts the audio and plays audio back, but you can also send audio whenever you want. They're very nice little devices.

by stavros

3/24/2026 at 6:52:09 AM

*Asterisk

by lnx01

3/24/2026 at 5:39:50 AM

There's Butterfly and another company I can't remember and undoubtedly more, that have expensive systems for large complexes, so the niche is the small buildings that don't have a ton of money. Maybe the softwarepocalypse can help with that.

by fragmede

3/24/2026 at 6:53:39 AM

Everything involving audio is an annoying mess.

The first step is getting speakers in a room: there are tons of products that do this, apple, google, Sonos.

Most of them have the audio quality of a bag of instruments.

There are tons of class D amps that you can hook up to speakers: Wiim, acrylic and so on... this will run you anywhere from 100 bucks to 500 and thats before you buy the speakers. Most of these will be great for playing music and projecting your voice.

The moment you involve a TV... well things get ugly because your going to want arc for HDMI and your going to want a center channel cause with out it your likely in subtitle hell half the time. This will get expensive a Sonos sound bar is a few hundred and if you want something better well... Let's say you can get to the point of making a GPU look affordable real quick.

Now that you can play audio, how do you hear it... well your phone works and there are tons of satellites out there.

You're now going to need to run home assistant to "interrupt" what ever is playing (if something is) to play your message and then return what ever it was to its current state.

After trying out WIIM, Acrylic, some high end stereo gear I just settled on half assed audio quality and bought more Sonos gear. I kept a single WIIM unit, cheap amp, decent speakers and a sub around for when I want to really listen to music but other than that I tolerate sonos' middling quality for day to day use (and I am, by no means an audiophile).

by zer00eyz

3/24/2026 at 8:12:39 AM

> Why aren’t there more ‘semi dumb’ Ethernet or wifi products that just let you announce that dinner is ready?

Because of 2 reasons

1) this is very antisocial behavior.

2) so many people have a mobile phone at arm's reach a majority of the time so there you have your intercom.

Well educated members of an household would know when dinner is ready because they would actually help make it ready for everyone. Occasionally one teenager could legitimately focus on homework but it is not actually a bad thing that someone has to move its ass and walk upstairs to knock at their door and tell them. We call that free exercise, much cheaper than a fitness subscription.

When I hear about home assistant and domotic in general, the only image that comes to me is those scenes in Wall-E where people live in a flying armchair with a holo screen in front of their face 24/7, their only interaction with a physical world being to only move their arms once in a while to grab a soda.

When I was a kid I remember a house we rented for a while came with intercom using the electrical lines. Past the initial novelty, they mostly collected dust and ended up being unplugged.

by prmoustache

3/24/2026 at 7:22:22 AM

Frank's guests just need to get the Doorking 16120 default key and start letting themselves in.

Edit: undergrad shenanigans from ten years ago:

Our university student-run electronics lab had an issue: technically anyone with a student card was allowed on premises at any given time, but the department only gave us a small set of keys that we had to share with the rest of the student associations. Obviously we needed a solution.

We did some snooping and found that the request-to-exit button wire was running on a cable tray alongside all the other wiring and plumbing, as the lab was in the basement. We picked a suitably dark, inconspicuous spot and wired up a Raspberry Pi driving a transistor and in turn a relay which we then wired in parallel with that button. Users could then connect to the local lab wifi and then SSH into the device. Login shell was replaced with a script that pulsed the GPIO line for half a second and subsequently caused the door to open.

We never got caught and apparently all the evidence was destroyed when the building was renovated a few years later.

by anilakar

3/24/2026 at 8:19:54 AM

The upside is that this is perfectly SOC2-compliant, as long as auditors don’t find out about the Raspberry.

by eastbound

3/24/2026 at 9:04:43 AM

What Raspberry? I don't see any Raspberry.

by ThePowerOfFuet

3/24/2026 at 8:17:22 AM

Brilliant!

by nunez

3/24/2026 at 10:11:38 AM

For some European intercoms, there is Doorman [0]. Their authors reversed engineered the protocol used by Koch and built an ESP32 + Home Assistant solution that works quite nicely (including board). The "party mode" [1] was a life saver for me when doing events on the rooftop.

[0] https://doorman.azon.ai/ [1] https://doorman.azon.ai/guide/features/ring-to-open

by peralta

3/24/2026 at 8:58:46 AM

Great, the esp32 will probably never be discovered. Because when the landlord decides to fix the original problem, the whole unit will probably be replaced.

by xmlninja

3/24/2026 at 8:29:58 AM

I ended up using https://eu.switch-bot.com/products/switchbot-bot -- just have a finger robot push the button

by dosinga

3/24/2026 at 8:42:06 AM

Hah, I did the same exact thing and came here to say that :) I was looking at wiring diagrams and telling myself I could wire up some arduino circuits for it but gave up when when I realized I could just press the button!

edit: although mine was an ancient system from the early 90s. It was just replaced with a modern system a couple months ago. At my previous apartment I had wanted to set up a system that would allow either my then partner or I to activate the callbox and have it set for a VOIP number since we could only put one number on the box.

by foota

3/24/2026 at 5:58:19 AM

Was always wanting to do something like this before they swapped ours out for a SaaS+hardware butterfly mx thing.

Those Doorkings have had to get replaced at so many buildings in Seattle now that criminals figured out how easy they were to override.

by jeffwilcox

3/24/2026 at 7:37:16 AM

I use a Ring Intercom Audio for a similar use. Works surprisingly well, I wish someone would clone the hardware and make an open version so Jeff didn't listen in every time someone rings my doorbell or buzz himself in whenever he wants.

No native apple home - homebridge handles that.

by blitzar

3/24/2026 at 8:07:58 AM

Of course it had to mention Claude and Rust haha.

That aside, I enjoyed this read and it's such a niche thing that there is almost no way they'll step on the toes of another resident wanting to do the same thing

by dwedge

3/24/2026 at 7:37:36 AM

I did similar in my apartment in Amsterdam but a little more low-tech. I soldered the relay on an Esp8266 directly to the unlock button on the intercom PCB in my apartment. Worked flawlessly for years

by sharklasers123

3/24/2026 at 6:09:39 AM

Fun. I did this recently with mine. There's now a discreet USB cable running down from behind it...

by wzdd

3/24/2026 at 9:48:58 AM

Backdooring common property with questionable technology? Sad.

by jojobas

3/24/2026 at 7:25:21 AM

Confessing to felonies, in writing, under one’s real name is wild.

Here’s hoping nobody decides to bother them about this. I’m not a lawyer but this appears to this layperson at the very least a CFAA violation by accessing the router and resetting its root password, as well as possibly criminal mischief as well as whatever stealing AC power is.

You couldn’t pay me to do a writeup like this, and I’d be wearing gloves the whole time.

by sneak

3/24/2026 at 8:50:42 AM

I felt myself starting to sweat as I read. I can't imagine doing this at my apartment complex, let alone at someone else's. Messing with building controls (old or unused as they may be) sounds like a great way to get your lease nixed and your ass out the door quicker than a lawyer can say "Yeah, I can't help you here, they're well within their rights to evict you for that."

I was hoping they'd mention something about the legality (or lack thereof), but I guess that's an exercise left to the reader who wants to try this out at their own apartment.

by qaadika

3/24/2026 at 9:05:31 AM

> sounds like a great way to get your lease nixed and your ass out the door quicker than a lawyer can say "Yeah, I can't help you here, they're well within their rights to evict you for that."

For repairing a broken thing? After provably trying in vain to get the landlord to fix it?

by Hackbraten

3/24/2026 at 9:54:29 AM

> For repairing a broken thing? After provably trying in vain to get the landlord to fix it?

Down the hallway from my office used to be the management of a small hotel chain. We often had lunch together and I got to hear a bunch of interesting anecdotes over the years.

Way back when they started up and didn't yet have enough cash to actually own the buildings they operated in, so they rented. One of the buildings turned out to have numerous issues (holes in the roof, gaps near exterior walls, etc...). To the point that they eventually didn't pass a fire inspection. They repeatedly asked the owner to have it fixed. Pressed for time, they themselves eventually payed someone, out of their own pocket, so it would at least be up to code for the fire inspection.

From what I was told, the owner threw a tantrum over them modifying the building, terminated the contract and sued them. Successfully.

If you are a tenant in a rental apartment, you'd probably have more leniency on the legal side (compared to a company renting a business property). But still, I'd be very careful making any assumptions about the legal situation rather than risking some sort of Kafkaesque legal mess.

Over here at least, it is very common in apartment complexes that the apartment owner is a different person/entity than the building owner and only the later has the rights to mess with stuff installed in the walls (e.g. plumbing) and especially stuff elsewhere in the building (e.g. an external intercom system). If you ask the landlord to fix it, the best they could do is forward that request to the building owner. If you pulled a stunt like the OP did, there's a good chance that the building owner will sue your landlord.

by st_goliath

3/24/2026 at 9:14:48 AM

Well he didn't "fix" it, he hacked it to work for one tenant. And to allow said tenant's non-tenant's friends free access into the building. "fixing it" would be restoring the voice call ability to its original function. Not modding it for one random tenant's Apple Home setup.

And it's definitely possible to get in trouble for "fixing" something if you're not authorized to fix it.

I would call this "bypassing building controls to allow unauthorized access to the building." Frank has access to the building through the allowed means per his lease, not through any means. If his lease is like mine there's a whole page to initial about being granted access through the gates or pool or whatever with only the complex-assigned keys and RFID tags.

(I presume Frank lives in the US, and his state's tenancy laws similar to mine apply.)

by qaadika

3/24/2026 at 7:49:55 AM

How is it stealing power if the power is exclusively used for restoring a service or system that the tenant is paying for?

by Hackbraten

3/24/2026 at 8:08:38 AM

It's a repair from where I'm sitting. A really cheap one too.

by hparadiz

3/24/2026 at 8:32:22 AM

It's a little sad that, having realised that the simplest route for the hardware was the best, a simple route for communications wasn't explored. I suspect that cramming in a complex stack wasn't the best or quickest solution.

by beardyw

3/24/2026 at 6:20:53 AM

Related, I'm still upset at the lies told by landlords regarding phone number privacy in buzz-in intercoms. I've been told multiple times at multiple apartment buildings, "don't worry, while the system will call your phone when someone taps your entry code, your phone number won't be revealed". And then you sign the lease, get a delivery from Instacart in your new place, and find that your 'private' number is blasted out loud, heard a whole city block away, in a loud-ass DTMF tone sequence.

BS.

by cryptoz

3/24/2026 at 10:23:26 AM

Tldr: he found the wire to the solenoid. Cool stuff. Do the easy thing! The rabbit hole avoidance was impressive. Like an escape room of sorts. Questionable legality notwithstanding.

by mememememememo