Electricity status bot

The bot monitors the power sourse and when it changes it sends a message to a telegram chat/channel informing you about electricity situation in your house.

Equipment

• Raspberry Pi
• USB to TTL converter
• Powerbank for the Pi
• 3G/4G USB modem
• Charger with 2 USB ports
• 2 jumper wires (F/F)

Assembly

• Follow the scematics (file inside root dir)
• Connect 3.3V cable from TTL converter to GPIO 18 pin on the Pi (google the pinout for your Pi version)
• Connect the ground pin to any GND pin on the Pi

How to use

• create a bot in the telegram (search for @BotFather and send /start)
• copy the bot's HTTP API key to the .env file
• go to https://web.telegram.org/, login and create a new group chat/channel
• open the chat and in the URL find the chatId (e.g. -123456789)
• (!!!) if you decided to go with the channel and not chat, you might need to prefix the channel ID with 100 (e.g. -123456789 -> -100123456789)
• copy chatId/channelId to the .env file
• run bash start.sh in the root directory
• to test, simply plug/unplug your charger

Notes

• it might take a few seconds for the TTL converter to completely power off
• make the start.sh script run on boot

  • create a file BlackoutStatus.service in /etc/systemd/system/ with the following content.

    [Service]
    WorkingDirectory=<ABSOLUTE-PATH-TO-PROJECT-ROOT-DIR>
    ExecStart=bash <ABSOLUTE-PATH-TO-PROJECT-ROOT-DIR>/start.sh
    Restart=always
    StandardOutput=syslog
    StandardError=syslog
    SyslogIdentifier=blackoutStatus\
    User=root
    Group=root
    Environment=NODE_ENV=production
    [Install]
    WantedBy=multi-user.target
    

  • run sudo chmod u+rwx /etc/systemd/system/propanel.service

  • enable service sudo systemctl enable blackoutStatus

  • reboot sudo reboot