citofono = doorbell so citof-bot.
we needed to open the gate at home from our phone. so we made a telegram bot
hardware was designed and completed by dad. so i had 2 pins of a raspberry: one was attached to the signal from the doorbell, the other opened it. they're used as a Button and as a LED respectively. the bot features plenty of useless features, offering a conversation to add responses
create a token.txt file with the bot token, in the same directory as the script. then run the script python3 citofbot.py. i think it needs su privileges for pins. there's a shell script if you like that better.
then set it up to run on boot. you can use systemd service, but i found crontab easier. sudo crontab -e -> add line @reboot <PATH_TO_SCRIPT>/tgbotlauncher.sh > <PATH_TO_LOGS>/logs/citof-bot-log 2>&1 or any sensible variation of it and you're done
the bot uses a config.json file to store enabled chats. dad chose that the easiest way to implement security was to make "enabling a chat == directly editing the config file". i agreed, since it's just vpn in local network + ssh into raspberry. so to add a new enabled chat, you call the add_chat command from the chat you want to add, then edit config.json to enable it. removing it is just calling remove_chat.
a fallback message is defined as a constant somewhere around the top of citofbot.py. i wanted to play around with state machines and explore the library a little bit, so the bot takes you for a conversation if you input change_responses.
i switch back between english and italian sometimes. sorry. code is obv full english though :)
- i like my use of decorators to check if a chat is enabled before running the authed commands.
- editing the config file manually means that it must be checked before every operation. just in case, i added a
reload_confcommand. - i didn't really process errors. they're logged at least, chat migration is handled, everything else is good luck
- bot initialization is wrapped in a retry loop. i was having a connection issue that went like this:
- lights go out for some reason
- a family member flips the switch back up
- the DNS server + DHCP is handled by a local NAS, which takes a long time to boot up
- the raspberry is up very quickly -> bot initialization fails i solved it by assigning a static IP, but left the retry loop in there anyway
- when you're adding a new response, the bot waits for a reply to its message. if it catches a message that's not a direct reply (needs to be admin in order to be able to read it), it tells you it's waiting for a reply, not just a message. i thought that was pretty cool
- i wrote this a while ago and had fun. didn't expect it to be the hands-down most-used personal project i wrote.
- i want to turn this into an app, so that i can just tap the app icon to open the gate, without having to: open telegram, find the correct telegram convo, click the command