This is Technology Bytes, episode 181 for August 23rd, 2026.
Technology Bytes is a microcast where I share brief bytes on interesting technology.
Enjoy, and here we go.
So last week I talked about the smart home things and the 2.4 gigahertz Wi‑Fi band and some things, and I’ll get into that a little more later.
But what I’m going to talk about today is the Wemo smart doorbell.
So I had a Nacara doorbell, and it worked okay, but for some reason we couldn’t talk through it.
It had some issues, so I purchased a Wemo smart doorbell.
And I’ve used Wemo devices before in my smart home, and they have worked well.
And this Wemo smart doorbell, in comparison, is quite inexpensive and does much of, if not all of, what the other doorbells do as well.
My Nacara doorbell on sale is like $130 or something like that, and this Wemo one was $65, then plus tax.
I think it ended up being about $75 in total.
And I read about how to do it, so the setup was fairly easy.
So when it arrived and I set it up, the most difficult thing is I had a little dongle that had to go on my actual doorbell in the house, the ringer part, the notification box that’s on the wall, often in hallways or somewhere near the front door.
And it said so that it knows so that the doorbell is powered properly.
I don’t fully understand it.
I read it a few times, but I’ve got wires out to my doorbell, so it’s not working on a battery.
It’s actually working wired, and so that’s pretty easy to put together.
So I hung this dongle off of my inside doorbell, and that seems to have worked fairly well.
And then I did the rest of the setup.
The setup was pretty cool because it has a base that you put in the wall.
I got lucky or was blessed or whatever that the holes that I had drilled in the wall and put the inserts in to screw the Aqara onto my doorbell spot fit exactly with the available holes in the Wemo, so I didn’t have to do any other kind of setup for that.
So that made it quite simple.
And then the Wemo smart doorbell has a pretty cool thing.
It lets you attach—it has you, not lets you—the setup is you attach the wires from the doorbell to the base unit.
That’s where the set screws are, or the screws, and you wrap the wire around the screws.
You know how to wire stuff, and tighten them in there.
And then the doorbell just latches on the top, and it’s got two connectors and there’s two copper plates, and then you just push it in, and there’s a set screw on the bottom to keep it all together, and so fairly simple.
And the cool thing is that if you end up having to take the doorbell part off for whatever reason, you’re not messing with the wires anymore because the wires are connected to the base.
And so it was pretty cool, pretty easy setup.
I think from the time that I opened the package to the time that the doorbell was active was, you know, less than a half an hour, maybe less than 20 minutes.
So pretty happy, and I’ll explain a little bit more about what we got here in the next few minutes.
So one of the things that keeps the Wemo smart doorbell from ranking as high as maybe some others is that it is only available for Apple HomeKit.
It doesn’t work with anything else.
And while that means that not many may purchase it, it fits exactly in the home that I own and the smart home that I’ve built because, as you are aware at this point, everything I do is Apple.
So that kind of had a little bit of a con, you know, and you’re looking at the pros and cons, but to me that means nothing because that’s where I live, that’s where I want to live, that’s where I exist.
And so the setup was quite simple.
By the time I got it connected, you don’t use a Wemo.
App, which I really like.
And you just open HomeKit, say add an accessory, and you say, hey, this is the, you know, in this case they had an NFC chip in it.
I just held my phone next to it and it says, hey, there’s a doorbell.
Do you want to set it up?
I said yes, set it up.
So a couple things that this doorbell does, it’s got a very, it’s got the largest view angle of any doorbell on the market.
Some of the complaints with that is that the edges get distorted because you’re kind of in that fisheye realm of the lens.
But the center part is very well focused.
You do have high definition video.
I can’t remember if it’s 4K, but I don’t think so.
But it works with Apple Secure Video because I have that part of the world because of all the money that I give Apple for everything that I do.
And then the talk function worked very well.
So as, you know, once we had it set up and then my wife was inside, I was outside, and we tested that and it worked as well.
So, so far things are doing what we want them to.
I still need to look at a little bit of the setup.
We have people delivering packages, and I think that should alarm at some point or notify us, and I thought I turned it on.
So anyway, it’s not that it won’t.
I think I just don’t have my setup quite correctly done at this point.
But either way, we can still see the angle is so big, we can see right, almost right down the door that it’s set up against.
But not quite, but any package that would get set on our…
You know, entry mat there would be visible.
So it has great view, great angle, has the talk capability, very simple to set up.
So I’m super happy with the purchase at this point.
Last week on my podcast, I was complaining about the 2.4 gigahertz and so many smart home devices only using that bandwidth, and so having to do things like turn off my 5 gigahertz bandwidth so that my phone is on the 2.4 so that I can set up the devices and then have to turn it back on and yada yada yada.
So I was super happy to read that this doorbell is a dual-band doorbell.
So it’s got the 2.4 gigahertz, which gives it some stability.
It’s got the 5 gigahertz that gives it maybe a little bit more range.
But the nice thing is that I didn’t have to do anything with my phone.
I didn’t have to do anything with my Wi‑Fi network.
So I really have to eat my words a little bit because maybe smart home devices are getting a little smarter and doing that dual-band setup so that my phone can talk to it while I’m doing the setup.
And so that was really nice.
No jumping through hoops, no real technical challenges.
Just set it up and go.
So really happy with the purchase.
Again, fairly inexpensive, quite a bit less expensive than all the other smart doorbells on the market, I think, and it seems to be doing exactly what I need it to be doing.
So, so far, so good, and we’ll see if things hold for the next weeks and months and hopefully years.
Well, that is all I have for today.
If you have any comments, suggestions, or questions, you can send them to technologybytes@marriagfamily.com.
As always, I want to thank you for listening to the Technology Bytes microcast, and I look forward to the next time we are together taking another bite of technology.
