The reason for the AC is because the vast, VAST, majority, effectively all, doorbell systems run on low voltage AC provided by a transformer somewhere in the house. It steps the mains voltage down but does not rectify it. Thus when designing their intrusive framework for their privacy eroding xenophobe placating doorbell replacement device it makes perfect sense why it would be designed for AC. Also, somewhere on that board that AC has to be rectified to DC, so why not just feed it the DC plus the diode Vf drop of the rectifier? 

Honestly, I say get rid of the thing. Ring, Amazon, the gainspan firmware developer, and more im sure have proven themselves to not respect the customer and actively invade their privacy in secret. I had a Ring technician tell me my home network would be LESS secure if I setup a version 2 I got as a 'gift' to interface with a server I already had on my network for other projects, than to just go along with letting their grubby cloud fingers to punch holes in my firewall. Also, do you know why they're so slow to respond? Its because they phone home, negotiate a SIP session, then set an event update in their system, then another system checks your account for event updates and sends a push notification to your phone which negotiates a secure tunnel (except you dont know what keys are being used and how, the thing has the capability to transparent proxy any other device on your network, turning all your https tls secured perfect forward security data into plain text for Amazon to datamine....or the fuzz to scrutinize....), then loads the app, then the phone negotiates to also be on the SIP call stream....and then FINALLY you get to see the backside of whoever got tired of waiting for someone to answer the door. At LEAST 10 seconds from button push to notification.... That is unreasonable. If they just let us use our own file servers to store video (instead of wasting all those resources storing everyones on their infrastructure (which they scaremonger customers into paying for), cloud is just a word for 'someone elses computer) and also to run a local SIP/MQTT (two known publicly available protocols, not special proprietary Amazon magic), leveraging googles oauth for external access and authentication, a feature built into everyones android phones, it would take seconds. Even away from home. But because they see the customer as a potential data source, plus the gamble they can M-EFFer users to pay for over priced video storage (im convinced the gadgets are loss leaders and they make that money back on duping people into paying for  their services), on top of the blatantly disrespectful attitude towards the intelligence of the average tech savvy person, the best they can do is a laggy as hell connection piped from your door, to their server, then sent to your phone....when the doorbell and phone (hell a smart tv can decode the video protocol it uses) could just talk to each other directly.

And honestly its those kinds of Brad in marketing methods of milking us walking wallets that keeps IoT a pipedream. The first company that has some respect for the user and lets us use our old computers we all have laying around as an IoT controller, locally, instead of trying to squeeze more money from us to pay for the massive backend data framework that isn't really needed in many cases, that company will corner the market overnight. And all they have to do is respect the customer enough to not see them as a shoe in for some subscription service revenue stream. It sounds so simple youd think one of these companies would have tried it by now....Im not so much mad as I am disappointed....in all of you...both the complacent customers and company screwing em over.... 

I think it's much easier to do this hack, and a lot less risky,

You only have to unassembly the main button (an easy step), and then you can solder directly on the microswitch pads. I can post pictures if allowed.

And it is easy to power the Ring with a DC power supply, no matter the polarity, directly in the main power screws from the Ring (at least it works with the DC power supply provided by Ring).

No need of dissasembly for powering the Ring with DC.

Hello,

I want to trigger the Ring video from an externar swith (my doorbell button), but I think I can use the Ring button to trigger the doorbell chime too.

I would connect the external swith to a relay to trigger the Ring video.

I would connect the Ring to another relay to trigger the doorbell.

In the second case, I would connect the relay coil to the positive of the power supply and to the pin that you soldered the  cable for the button, then when the ring button is pushed, the coil will have GND from the push pin and positive from the power supply.

Do you agree with this configuration? Is the pin you marked the correct one for this purpose?

You can power the Ring video externally from a DC power supply, I am using the one provided by Ring, and you can reverse the polarity without problem.

Thank you!