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.
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.
Most of the implementation does not change, especially all the Things and Items are the same. The Rules change however.
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.
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).
openHAB 2 comes with a Telegram binding which allows to run a Telegram Bot. This bot can both send messages to users and groups, and can receive commands and respond to them. That’s useful: your home automation system can send all kind of details to your mobile phone.
Created a new Telegram Group for testing, and wanted to know the Group ID to send messages to the group using a bot.