TLDR: I’ve setup Ring Intercom with my Urmet 1130 intercom, and modify the Ring integration to make it work with Home Assistant, which you could find here. Hope the PR I’ve made will be merged soon into HA core.

Some months ago, I’ve shared my experience of using a Zigbee relay and vibration sensor with my intercom, which worked so great. However, I was thinking about an idea to setup VoIP to send/receive call to the intercom, no success so far sadly.

Good news came, Ring introduced their new WiFi-powered intercom to Italy recently, and as soon as it was available on Amazon, I grabbed it from the first day and started setting it up, after verifying it’s compatibile with my Urmet 1130/3D intercom.

Thought it would be an easy setup since I had already worked with my intercom and smart home devices before, but it was not as straightforward as I expected. After wiring all the cables and connecting the Ring intercom to my network, I tried to ring the gate’s bell, but sadly, nothing happened. No notifications on my phone, and the intercom stopped ringing – this was a bit disappointing (and scary). Something’s wrong here!

Checking the wiring of the intercom, I’ve found out that the port 7 (Chiamata) was not connected properly, so it caused the incoming ring signal to be lost. Fixing the connection made the notification works normally! but the Ring app still could not open the gate. After some more troubleshooting and Google search, it seems that the port 9 (Apertura) was not connected to the gate circuit, which was preventing Ring from opening the gate.

I bridged this port with the Door Open button, and finally everything worked perfectly! I could receive a notification when someone rang the gate, and the two-way audio communication feature was amazing. Now, I can answer the gate whenever I’m outside, especially when I’m not at home to receive deliveries. It’s is the key features that makes smart intercoms like the Ring Intercom so valuable – especially useful for busy people like me who are often on the go, but still want to be able to keep an eye on home.

Next part, (as usual) I wanted to integrate this device with my Home assistant server. After discovering that the Ring integration in my Home Assistant installation didn’t support the Intercom devices, I started looking for solutions. And seems that many people were facing the same problem. Even worse, the Python package that the integration depended on, ring_doorbell, seemed to be abandoned. I stumbled upon a PR that added support for the Intercom to the library from @rautsch, but unfortunately, it wasn’t approved.

So, I decided to take matters into my own hands and bring this PR to my local Python venv libraries. Then I tried to make some modifications to the integration to make Home Assistant recognize the Intercom, and it worked! Now, I can have the Ring Intercom registered on Home Assistant, with battery and bell sensor.

But I wanted more than just those basic functionalities. Was curious about how the Ring app communicates with the Ring server, I decided to try reverse engineering the Android app and its communications. After a while, I’ve managed to add even more features to the integration: creating a button to open the door, and options to change the microphone and speaker volume. Finally, everything works perfectly on my Home Assistant! Now it’s time to write some smart automations with it!

I’m sooo glad that I’ve spent some time to figure out solutions to problems. Sometimes, you will have to take matters into your own hands to get the results you want. And it’s so nice being a developer 🙂

Update: I’ve upgraded my intercom to a newer Urmet 1130/16 😀

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