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A while ago someone mentioned "reminders" used in their home audio system, and I took that idea and implemented something similar in openHAB.

The basic idea is that I can send scheduled notifications to any audio sink openHAB is using, possibly more than one audio sink for one message. Also I want to differentiate between a simple audio sound, and text output.

For the text audio output I installed Text-to-Speech a while ago, this enables the ability to output text as audio in different languages. In addition I want an information when a reminder is "fired" in my Telegram control channel. As audio sink I'm mostly using ChromeCasts here, but anything openHAB can connect to is usable here.

A while ago I integrated DWD warnings (Deutscher Wetterdienst) into our home automation system, and receive severe weather notifications ever since then. That works quite good, but it was missing a weblink with more details - or if you want to forward the warning to someone it would be useful to have a link to the warning as well. The DWD binding does not provide that piece of information, but it is easy enough to add - or so I thought.

In my previous blog post about "Tankerkönig" I explained the details of how to integrate this binding into openHAB and provide a Telegram interface.

Someone on the openHAB community forum pointed out that Telegram bots allow queries, where one can present the user with options, and the user only has to click on one of the options. That makes it easier to use, and less typing is required as well. I went ahead and implemented that.

The "Deutscher Wetterdienst" DWD (German Weather Service) provices a service which sends out alarms for upcoming events, like heavy rain, storm, blizzard, strong winds ect. This service is only available for Germany. And it has a binding for openHAB. Time to integrate this, activate a number of regions I'm interested in, and send notifications to our mobile phones.

At this point I'm really happy that I deploy my openHAB with Ansible, I can use the Template module and loop over the Items, Things and Rules.

The Binding can "track" multiple regions, so called Cell IDs. I'm interested in 4 different Cells (the list is available here), your mileage might vary. For each reagion there can be multiple messages - and although every single example I found only assumes there is only one message (warningCount=1), I already had a situation where a Cell had two warnings. That information likely goes missing if you set warningCount to 1. Given how much configuration overhead it is when you add more channels, I can understand why most examples stay at "1" for warningCount. Doubling the number doubles the number of Items (12 -> 24). However since I deploy everything in a template, that's not a problem here.

I started this with a generous warningCount=5 - and in my templates I just loop from 1 to 5, and over every Cell, and generate all the necessary Things and Rules for every channel.

Ok, the details:

In Germany, every gas station must report gas prices online, to the "Markttransparenzstelle für Kraftstoffe". Businesses and users can then fetch this data and provide services. One of these companies is Tankerkönig, and there's also a Binding for openHAB.

If you are interested in gas prices for certain gas stations, you need to sign up for a (free) API key, and figure out the IDs of the gas stations. For that go to this website, Position the blue marker on the location you are interested in, and then click on all the gas stations you want to include. Finally click on "Tankstellen übernehmen" - this will open a JSON with the data, from there extract the "id" (and possibly the other data as well).

Created a new Telegram Group for testing, and wanted to know the Group ID to send messages to the group using a bot.

One quick way (there are other ways as well):

• Go to: https://web.telegram.org/
• Login using your phone number
• Telegram sends you a confirmation code to your client on your mobile device
• Once you are logged in: click on the group
• The URL changes to something like: https://web.telegram.org/#/im?p=g1234567
• Pick the number after "p=g" (in this example: 1234567), and negate it (Group numbers in Telegram are negative)

The group number is: -1234567