Amazon Dash as a doorbell using Pushover

Configure an Amazon Dash Button as a doorbell with the help of a Raspberry Pi using Pushover.

Required pre-requisites:

This app relies on Pushover which costs around £4.99 on iOS / Android. You'll need to create an app in Pushover as you'll need the API and user tokens later. Further details on how to create an app can be found part-way through this guide.

Please run the following before:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade -y
sudo apt-get install python-scapy tcpdump python-pip -y
sudo pip install requests

Find your Amazon Dash Button's MAC address

You will need to add your Amazon Dash Button's MAC address to the dashdoorbell.py script for this to work. Details on how to find out your MAC address can be found here and then replace the following in the script:

# Set your Dash Button's MAC address below
DASH_BUTTON_MAC = 'xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx'

Replace the xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx with your MAC address, but ensure it is all lower case!

Clone this repository

Unless you want to manually create the Python script yourself, simply clone this by running:

git clone https://github.com/raspberrycoulis/dashdoorbell.git

Substitute the relevant parts in the dashdoorbell.py script

Specifically, you'll need:

• MAC address of your Amazon Dash Button
• Pushover API and user tokens

You can also customise the message received in Pushover by editing any of the following:

• title
• message
• url
• url_title
• sound (a full list of the sound effects in Pushover can be found here)

If you are feeling creative, you can also enable HTML messaging by changing html from 0 to 1.

Running on boot

I prefer to use systemd to run Python scripts on boot as you can run them as a service, start, stop, restart them and check the status of them easily. To do so, you need to do the following:

sudo nano /lib/systemd/system/dashdoorbell.service

Then add the following:

[Unit]
Description=Amazon Dash Doorbell Service
After=multi-user.target

[Service]
Type=idle
ExecStart=/usr/bin/python /home/pi/github/dashdoorbell/dashdoorbell.py > /home/pi/github/dashdoorbell/dashdoorbell.log 2>&1
Restart=always
RestartSec=5

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

The parts to check are the ExecStart command as this assumes the dashdoorbell.py script is located in /home/pi/github/dashdoorbell so please update accordingly if you have installed the script in a different location.

Once you have done this, Ctrl+X to exit and Y to save then run:

sudo chmod 644 /lib/systemd/system/dashdoorbell.service
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable dashdoorbell.service

You can sudo reboot or simply run sudo systemctl start dashdoorbell.service to start the script. Check the status by running sudo systemctl status dashdoorbell.service.