ZWave Fun - Day 1

I've got a few zwave projects I want to do around my home. The first one involves my doorbell and getting a notification about my visitor. The other involves turning my cell phone into a type of zwave controller.

The Doorbell Project
We are just finishing up our home theatre room in the basement. It's sound-proofed and tucked away in the far reaches of our house. I like my movies loud, so when the doorbell rings, chances are I'll not be able to hear it.... not that I care anyway, I'd rather people contact me via email... but The Wife cares. So this got me thinking about how I could do some smart home automation to solve the problem.

The solution I'd like would be to install a weather-proof IP camera outside above the door. When a visitor arrives, the camera would take a picture and either display it on my TV (as a live feed) or take a few frames and toss an SMS message with the picture of my visitor on my cell phone.

There are of course a few problems, I'll touch on the one that I know is going to be the breaker:

To my knowledge there's no such thing as a zwave doorbell. I'd have to figure out some other way to notify my server that the doorbell has been triggered. Since I have a wireless doorbell, my initial thought was to locate some sort of device that could intercept the frequency of my doorbell... it does seem like a lot of work but perhaps there's a simple solution that can already integrate with the computer?

Another thought might be to install a motion detector outside near the door and let that trigger the camera. This could work well since there are already plenty of proven motion detectors around. One down side to this might be false positives though (like say a car drives by, I wouldn't want that triggering my camera and spamming me for the fun of it...)

A final option would be to make my own doorbell. I'm sure I could put together a zwave switch outside that would trigger my computer to make a doorbell chime. Not sure how keen the wife would be on this idea though... :)

Cell Phone Controller
The other project is to convert my cell phone into a type of z-wave controller. This would involve having a server at home that would communicate with my cell phone and allow the phone to issue commands. Seems pretty straight forward. I'm most likely going to tackle this project first as it involves the least cost and the most coding right out of the box... and since I'm a coder, that's what counts :)

So with that said, over the next few days I'll be making posts about how this project is coming along.