The Robin Proline Compact doorbell is the only HomeKit doorbell that supports PoE (Power over Ethernet), as of March 2023. Here’s a look inside it.
The motherboard sits on 6 plastic standoffs. Not pictured here are some plastic M3 bolts that fasten the PCB. Beware that one of the black standoffs is longer than the rest despite looking similar.
The camera lens is assembled with the green motherboard. There is a small wire harness that connects the white daughterboard.
The focal length is set by the lens being screwed on at a particular depth.
The motherboard is conformal-coated but the daughterboard is not, for some reason.
Internal storage is provided by a SanDisk Edge 16GB Micro SD card with an A1 random I/O speed rating.
The lens assembly is fastened to the motherboard by 2 screws. Removing it reveals the image sensor, which is quite small. Although the sensor is 5MP according to Robin, the doorbell has a measly video resolution of 1280×720.
The daughterboard handles the speaker, microphone, and the capacitive button. Since the capacitive button is glued to the face plate, it’s difficult to remove the daughterboard. This is the main challenge if you want to transplant the Robin Proline’s internals into a custom enclosure.
The microphone is glued to the daughterboard.
