batocera_notify

Built to display a window with an image and text for notifications sent from something like Home Assistant on your network.

There are probabally better ways to do this but was built to work without needing anything not availible on default Batocera install.

Uses python socket to listen for notifications on port 65432

Notifactions are expected in utf-8 in url;Title;Text format (see client.py example)

Notifications are displayed using Pygame

Security Warning

The notifcations are sent in clear text and there is no authentication for accepting connections

• Don't run this unless you are comfortable with any device on your network having access
• Don't run this unless you are comfortable with any device on your network potentially seeing the notifcation information

Instructions

This can all be done with a shell script called by Batocera's startup script

Set the Display environmental variable export DISPLAY=:0

Copy notify.py and display_script.py to /userdata/system on the Batocera box Example using scp

scp notify.py root@your-batocera:notify.py
scp display_script.py root@your-batocera:display_script.py

Set the permissions on both scripts to allow exectution

chmod +x notify.py
chmod +x display_script.py

Start the script

./notify.py &

Sending a notifications

Using Python

Once the script is running the client.py script shows an example of how to send a notification from a remote computer. The notifcation consists of a url to an image that the Batocera box has access to download with a web request, a Title heading and a text line.

Edit the client.py script and add your Batocera boxes address and the url, Title and text for your notfication and run the script.

Simple Home Assistant Example

This is the simplest way to test that things are working.

First copy the ha_batocera_notify.py script to somewhere Home Assistant can access it and make sure it has execute permissions.

Then add a shell_command entry to the Home Assistant configuration.yaml adding your Batocera and Home Assistant address information.

shell_command:
  batocera_notification: "/config/ha_batocera_notify.py <BATOCERA ADDRESS> 65432 'http://<HOME ASSISTANT ADDRESS:8123/local/<YOUR PNG IMAGE";Home Assistant;Hello World'"

Restart Home Assistant (reloading the YAML config files option does not appear to work for changes to configuration.yaml)

Go to Developer Tools --> Services and find the "Shell Command: batocera_notification" service

Click the Call Service button

Assuming everything is setup correctly and the notify.py script is running on your Batocera box the notifcation should go through.

See the Home Assistant Shell Command integration documentation for more advanced automation examples