Just in case anyone was thinking “I’m gonna buy one and put ESPHome on it” or something, the microcontroller is a Beken 7525UQN68 which I’ve not been able to find any robust documentation for. It is Tuya, so that might be an angle of attack. The quality is shockingly good for such a small sensor and the included batteries are a pair of 18650s which was a nice surprise. I’m probably going to reset and return it or just drop it at a charity shop.
Using 18650 batteries is nice. One of the few things I don’t like about the Eufy.
Next time I’m in ALDI I’m going to keep my eyes peeled for one of these.
Oh, I’m sure it’ll find you first.
This is just e-waste. Please don’t buy this. The resolution is 480p. Spend a few dollars more and get something you will actually KEEP.
It costs US$22.50 compared to US$100 for the Ring (that requires a US$10/month subscription). It’s going to have some compromises and calling it e-waste for that is weird as hell. 480p is also pawfectly good-enough for the use case as well. Like, when I was growing up 480i was pawfectly cromulent, and most terrestrial broadcast channels are still only 576p50 (on DVB) encoded as MPEG-2. Your doorbell doesn’t need to be 2K or 4K, and that’s just going to use more drive space for no reason.
Not weird. It’s ewaste. 480p in 2025 is trash. Eufy has 2k option for ~$60 on frequent sale with no subscription. So does Reolink.
So 3 times the cost? It’s a fucking doorbell. Does it ding? Camera is a bonus if you want that and 480p is easily enough to see who is there. It’s cheap yes, but it’s fine.
480p is bad for livestreaming a sporting event.
Its fine for a doorbell
What if I use my doorbell to watch sporting events?
Who is calling this e waste? What are you an AI clanker that needs a higher res to train on? If There is no update to brick the thing in 5 years and it doesnt rely on a non-replaceable battery its not e waste.
Aldi doesn’t do sales ever.
480p in 2025 is trash.
According to who? If it’s functional as a doorbell then why does it need to chase higher specs and drive the price up? It’s not a movie, and you’re pawbably looking at it on a 6 inch screen anyway.
If you don’t like it, don’t buy it, spend your money elsewhere. But asserting that no one will use it is ridiculous and more than a little bit privileged.
You can barely distinguish faces in 480p. It is useless. Technology progressed and there’s no reason to continue generating ewaste. These sensors are actual trash. Aldi isn’t selling old stock so this literal trash is purposefully manufactured only for people to discover it’s not actually useful and immediately return it.
Oh no, I can’t tell these people’s faces apart because someone on the internet said I wouldn’t be able too. What am I gonna do??
(the photo is 480x576 rather than 640x480 or 854x480 (16:9) but you get the idea)
Okay, to be fair to your point, I also think 480p is enough for a doorbell camera, unless you’re trying to ID stuff that’s far away from your door.
But also, you can’t compare the quality of a still photo with good lightning, and probably some good editing as well, vs a video that mixes in compression artifacts, and also depends on how good the hardware is. That’s why 480p videos taken with cameras 15 years ago look much worse than 480p videos taken with phones today.
Tl;Dr: not all 480p is created equal.
Oh yeah, absolutely. There are limitations there, and stuff like compression and format are going to make a huge difference. I just think the tradeoffs are acceptable for the price.
480p?!? So like the original Apple QuickTake from 1994? I mean where did they even find that component to use?
they took a 4k sensor and cut it into 10 pieces
Lol, practically guaranteed that this is modeled after funding it entirely on surveillance stalkerware. Article does not make any mention of who is hosting, software openness, transparency, or ownership. Sorry OP for the negative comment, and thanks for making the effort to post. For the sake of the public, this article is nothing more than an ad, with no relevant informative value required for skeptical citizenship in any democracy. It is crap journalism, like whoring for capitalism.
On the ‘bright’ side:
I imagine this thing from Aldi’s is probably a lot easier to hack into and figure out how to jail break, than something from Amazon.
It also has a port for an sd card… the actual product listing does not mention being paired with some kind of app or software, so… ???
Also it is just a 480p camera, so, its basically a 20 year old webcam.
I agree with you, very little information was provided but I presume this is just Tuya or some similar OEM brand and maybe you can install a local control and cut the cloud part of the equation.
At the moment it is pure speculation on my part, but I am sure there are plenty of smart folks out there who would love to tinker with it and maybe find a way to install some custom firmware to cut the stalkware.
To confirm the suspicions, yes, it is Tuya. It actually says so on the box. I’m still going to grab one, though: quite often the chipset can be reprogrammed and the fact that the specs say it’s 2.4GHz only make me think they’re using something pretty old-fashioned like an ESP32. Tuya stuff that advertises being dual-band generally isn’t worth bothering with at all.
It’s a shame that tuya camera* stuff, even cut from the cloud, still has so many issues integrating with ESPHome.
The hosting and external domain are the challenging bit and what needs funding. It has been awhile since I looked into any of this, but there wasn’t an easy way to make such a thing last time I checked.
I think most of these are offloading the video feed to do the ai segmentation and analysis features that make these useful onto a hosting service. I do not expect low pricing as a feature advertised by anyone making such a comprehensive, ethical, democratically safe device. Billionaire exploitation privateer pirates have no qualms about financing hardware at break even prices for monetizing the pillaging of democracy due to the failure of citizens to remain skeptical and well informed.
If they do the object recognition on the cloud there is no way they offer those doorbells without any monthly subscription. My guess is that it is either doing something on the device or is just a dumb camera with an RTSP feed without any AI features.
My guess is the latter, considering the price. And still 20 bucks for this doorbell without a monthly subscription is a good deal. If they build something natively supporting Home Assistant that would be a killer device.
But as a friend used to say, if something is free, you are the product.
I would be incredibly interested in this if it could work with Home Assistant and didn’t require any kind of proprietary software to run.
All their smart lights are tuya, or at least the ones that I have. The esp are swappable but are soldered to the boards and their a pain to open but can be done.
I purchased some of their downlughts to add another project to the pile and to feed my curiosity.
Yeah, my rule is that any Tuya device that uses Wifi is to be avoided. I’ve got plenty of Tuya bulbs and power meters that use Zigbee, though, and they’re alright but they talk directly to Home Assistant.
The … grocery store?
They sell tons of stuff that isn’t food.
Clothes and work & running gear(even Aldi merch once a year), budget electronics and appliances (their toaster ovens are very often used for DIY solder reflow ovens), garden tools and supplies like slug pellets and shears, and even lower quality tools that work fine for ocassional light use.
Lidl, a grocery store, even has a tool brand called parkside. It even rivals other brands in quality nowadays.
I always wondered why parkside was so much cheaper in
aldilidl vs other stores. Pretty decent for casual usage honestly.Specially now that Amazon is flooded with ewaste is my affordable go to brand.
LIDL are owned by a huge German wholesaler who are already dealing in large quantities, their middle aisle products are bought in huge volumes because they have such a laegr foot print of stores, unlike your average hardware shops where you’d otherwise be buying your drill, hedgehog hotel and speciality Greek produce.
That is the largest overstatement of the year.
It rivals aliexpress/amazon brands in quality, sure, but it still generally isn’t even at the quality of Ryobi, which is a lower-medium tier brand together with Bosch green, much less makita, dewalt, or Bosch blue.
Though for many non-renovating homeowners just needing the occasional drill work, it works just fine!
Lidl’s smarthome kit - specifically their lightbulbs - comes around once in a blue moon but is very good quality. Not up to the standard of Phillips, but on a par with IKEA.
Seemingly, yes.
It would be interesting if it is also compatible with Home Assistant. That could be a really good entry level video doorbell
Oh man if we get rtsp support that would be the best. I could finally swap out my inlaws wyze doorbell. Wyze are working with ICE btw.
Wyze has its own issues but working with the US I.C.E. doesn’t seem accurate. Where did you read that?
Amazon Ring does, not seeing evidence of Wyze doing that (but also no evidence they haven’t, just their claim they require warrants for it)
I still have a few wyze cams so this was a very troubling claim, I couldn’t verify it, could you please provide some citation?
The only troubling thing I found is that the emergency response company they outsource police dispatch to (noonlight), but they claim they don’t share any videos with them and only use their dispatch API for the home security system sensors, they explicitly say:
“Videos and/or the live streams from your Security Cameras are not shared with any Wyze employees or third parties (including Noonlight and the monitoring center).”
And in the same FAQs:
“Wyze does not share monitoring data with law enforcement or any third parties.”
https://www.wyze.com/pages/hms-faq#%3A~%3Atext=Wyze+does+not+share+monitoring%2Cfrom+the+Monitoring+Events+page. So are they liars? Please share what you know!
I use Reolink front door camera with RTSP (thru Frigate) to HA if that’s at all interesting
How were you able to get that to work? I just got a Reolink Doorbell camera and couldn’t get it to work on anything outside the Reolink client/app. I can’t even access it from a browser. All their documentation seems to indicate that it does not support it.
Although the other cameras I got from them just had an option to turn it on.
I think you gotta use the app to provision and then turn on the RTSP or ONVINF settings in there, then once you have the IP address, you just add the RTSP stream to Frigate
Dang, those options do not show up for me. It does for the other plugin cameras, but not for the battery doorbell camera. I wonder if they patched that out of the app.
Same, but I don’t want to run Ethernet to their door and the reolink cams are too expensive for them.
rtsp support
Ideally ONVIF support too, to get events (person detected, etc)
I want HomeKit compatibility. OR something hackable that requires no cloud connection. These companies are not our friends and have betrayed our trust at every step.
Just in time to dump ring after the flock data sharing.
I would absolutely buy this just to fuck with it and see if I could get an RTSP stream.
Any similar recommendations that can be purchased in the US? I’d love to ditch my ring, and wire it up to my HA, but need the two way calling…
Reolink?
The best subscription free option in the US is Eufy. Home Assistant integration is through HACS and is hacky, but it works and doorbell video is stored locally.
A bit off-topic but it’s always funny to hear about Aldi in other countries because in France they are mostly unkept dollar-stores where they sell all the leftovers that Temu customers did not want. Lidl is a luxurious supermarket in comparison and I always wonder why.
So interesting rabbit hole: Aldi was originally 1 company but split between two brothers into Aldi Nord and Aldi Sud (Aldi North and Aldi South) in the 1960s in Germany. The two companies share the same Aldi name, and work somewhat together but are separate and have their own territories. They are owned by the families of the original owners, and they do not compete directly against each other.
Aldi Sud covers southern Germany, eastern and southern Europe, the UK, Ireland, Australia and the USA. In the UK Aldi has got a reputation as a good employer, a discount supermarket that offers quality, and is the fastest growing supermarket. All the competitors now do “price matches” to Aldi to try and keep up. Aldi in the USA, Ireland and Australia are seemingly run very similar to the Aldi in the UK and of course in it’s base in Germany.
Meanwhile, Aldi Nord covers northern Germany, the Benelux countries, France, Spain and Portugal amongst others. It seems Aldi does not have as good a reputation in some of these countries? I can see stuff about aldi being dirty, with poor products and poor customer service. Not sure how true that is, but that is definitely not Aldi’s reputation in the UK where I live. Clean, good quality and happy staff is my experience.
So when you see Aldi in the anglosphere part of the internet, it’s all about Aldi Sud. Also total random aside but the 2 companies do compete in the US: Aldi Sud runs Aldi, while Aldi Nord sort-of-owns Trader Joe’s (it’s a “sister company” owned by the owners of Aldi Nord).
EDIT: Also in the UK, Aldi and Lidl are very similar in quality and style. Although Lidl does more fresh baked goods, and I personally prefer it but Aldi is nearer for me so I shop there.
This explains so many things about Aldi and Trader Joes in the US.
To add to that: The family name of the brothers is “Albrecht” and ALDI stands for “Albrecht Diskont” - German for “Albrecht Discount”.
Amazing answer. Thanks a lot!
Portugal amongst others. It seems Aldi does not have as good a reputation in some of these countries
No issues with Aldi in Portugal, that I know about…
In California Aldi stores are clean and orderly. Product selection is limited but they offer healthy staples at great prices. Non-food items are hit or miss but interesting to check out.
There’s Aldi in California? I haven’t seen them in norcal, just Trader Joe’s.
Yeah, there’s about 20 in the Los Angeles area.
Wow, nice! I’ll have to go to one next time I’m in the LA area!
Aldi feels almost posh in the US, I pretty much only shop there
No such thing as a free lunch.
I understand the sentiment but it’s 17 quid. And it’s 480p. And the storage is - from what I understand - not included because it uses an SD card. They’re making money on the hardware.
Like the good old days when companies made their money by selling stuff.
Price is in GBP, so this is talking about the UK. Is there any indication that US Aldis will get it?
