Home automation: second round

Some time ago I briefly mentioned here the main concepts behind the project. Nothing has changed dramatically, except that I realized that my SMSgate solution was outdated. The phone battery was seriously deteriorated and I also realized that it is not that easy to just replace the phone anymore.

Well, I had an old Android phone (HTC Wildfire) that was essentially lying unused for quite some time. There is not so much that one can do with this old phone... but it turned out it works just perfectly to send and receive SMS and much more.

If you are in the "business" of home automation and you have Android device, Tasker is a MUST HAVE! To send and receive SMS messages I use SMS Gateway (I could not find an easy way to send SMS from external device via Tasker).


Briefly: I have changed the original python code to send SMS via SMS Gateway via HTTP GET request from RPi and then I have slightly modified the example, so I can control stuff by SMS. It is very clean and simple solution.

Now, since I have web server on which I get the notifications from the SMS Gateway I can simply use the same code to handle events from Tasker! This is how I get notifications on call - piece of cake. I have added, at the end of the post, an example how to switch on/off device 2 via tdtool.