Save yourself from all the disillusionments in the future and run that wire.

Indeed, and if it stops working, debugging the wire will be much easier than reverse-engineering an obsolete mobile application.

If you need wireless and are not adverse to some tinkering, a pair of Arduinos, a button, a buzzer and a pair of RF 433MHz transceivers [1] may do the trick!

[1] https://randomnerdtutorials.com/rf-433mhz-transmitter-receiv...

Rather than trying to add a button at the front door, tap into your existing buzzer (or listen to it, maybe with an accelerometer on the Arduino)

I use the live feed from the Reaper drone overhead.

This seems like a good use case for LoRa wireless modules, I haven't used them personally, but they claim a range of 10 miles without obstacles. Try searching for "LoRaWAN Door Bell" if you want off-the-shelf products, or otherwise for "Arduino + LoRa" if you want to DIY :-)

I can recommend moteino - Arduino with a Lora transceiver piggy backed on it.

I embarked on a fun lockdown project retrofitting our traditional doorbell (which runs off a 12V AC transformer in the basement) to generate MQTT messages for logging and to trigger notifications (phone, pop-ups on my workstation, sonos noises, hue lighting flashes etc). I have the same problem of not hearing the front door from my office in the loft.

I ended up with an ESP-32 module connected to the house wifi, and an opto-isolated circuit to trigger it from the doorbell wiring. It sits in the basement where it's easy to give it power from a USB power adaptor.

Of course, the irony was that it was only after I'd lost a few days going down this particular rabbit hole that I discovered that almost every visitor (and especially delivery drivers) uses our door _knocker_, rather than the doorbell since it's much more obvious! The next project may be to electrify that, or mount a vibration sensor on the door!

Or just remove the door knocker :)

Not if it looks great!

I just bought a house and discovered that it has a working long-tube door chime system! It’s got 3 brass tubes, each over a meter long, perfectly tuned and plays a short musical number when someone presses the button. You can sure hear it anywhere in the house, but I really like this MQTT idea!

How about a baby phone near your door bell and one in your office?

My solution was to attach a little board from https://www.particle.io/ to a doorbell ringer to detect when the doorbell rings, which pokes a port on a PC in my office that is always on anyway. The PC uses ffmpeg to play a sound.

Something like this?

https://m.banggood.com/DIGOO-DG-DB1-433MHz-Wireless-Doorbell...

I think that's similar to the one they are referring to; does it have the range to pass through a house into the back yard?

what about hearing what's going on at the front door? a small pipe from door to office that transmits sounds (door bell or whatever is happening at front door)

Do you have wifi in the office?

There's the August doorbell.