How to integrate home automation and Telegram?
There are certain things that I want my home automation system to notify me of immediately (the alarm goes off, smoke is detected, grandma presses the button on the bracelet she wears on her arm, etc.). Until now, to send messages to my mobile phone, I used to do it by means of Pushoverand it worked well...
The problem with Pushover is that you need to have a client installed on your mobile phone, and this one customer is a paying customer (and if I want my wife or children to receive messages, they each have to install a client).
Luckily, I have found a node for Node-network that allows to send messages by TelegramIt works very well indeed.
Telegram allows the creation of "bots" ("robots"), which are simply chats to which users subscribe and which allow them to send and receive messages in an automated way.
With this node and a few lines and functions in Node-network, in one afternoon I had an interactive notification system.
Interactive? Yes, because this system allows, in addition to sending notifications, users can send messages to the bot and it responds with the requested information (or with new questions and even with menus to select options) in a very simple way.
For example, a user sends a message containing a message containing /alarm and the bot answers them with the status of the alarm (if it is active, inactive, if it has been triggered, etc).
I have also created in Nodered a connector from MQTT to Telegram, which allows any application that sends MQTT to send messages via Telegram in a very simple way.
It is one of the most interesting additions I have made to my Smart Home.
Be sure to subscribe to the Blog, if you haven't already done so, because I plan to write more articles on Telegram integration and I hope you will find them of interest.
Incidentally, this is a good, simple and inexpensive solution for receive notifications on the Smartwatch.
In my case, I have an Amazfit (an earlier model that you can see here) and I receive the notifications that the home automation system sends via Telegram).
Very useful!
Which Node-Red server have you used? The ones I've seen are almost all pay-as-you-go.
Node-red is free, you can install it on many devices.
I have installed Node-red on a Raspberry PI 3 but you can install it almost anywhere.
You can find it here: https://nodered.org/
However, the latest versions of Raspbian (the Raspberry Pi's operating system) come as standard so you don't have to install anything.