[Implemented] Receives messages (Telegram)

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Can anyone create a plugin???

I’m not good. My idea was put into practice by a coworker.

The idea came from:( http://www.instructables.com/id/Set-up-Telegram-Bot-on-Raspberry-Pi/?ALLSTEPS ) Step 6: What is a dicey clock?

Steps:

1. Create a ShellSensor device called “Telegram message”

   {
   “attributeName”: “message”,
   “attributeType”: “string”,
   “command”: “cat /home/pi/telereceive”,
   “interval”: 6000,
   “id”: “telegram-message”,
   “name”: “Telegram message”,
   “class”: “ShellSensor”
   }

2. Copy to home/pi diceyclock. py adjusted (Remember to insert your token into the bot’s code.)
   https://www.dropbox.com/s/my90mb8sqxehrka/diceyclock.py?dl=0

3. Edit sudo nano /etc/rc.local and add the python /home/pi/diceyclock.py

   fi
   python /home/pi/diceyclock.py
   exit 0

4. Restart Pi. After the restart check in home/pi is telereceive file

we already have a very fresh telegram plugin, check here
https://forum.pimatic.org/topic/2616/new-plugin-for-telegram
if you have any suggestions how to improve the plugin pls referr to the above thread

I know Telegram plugin. It is a useful plugin.
My idea was that Pimatic to receive messages from the phone (Telegram app). Someone who knows could simplify this process.

What I presented above works.
A simple example of the rule:
When
message of Telegram message = "xyz"
THEN
turn Lamp off

Excuse my language (google translate)

all’ fine no need to apoloigize!!
ok i understand. but isn’t or could that be also be a part of the plugin or must there be a new plugin then?
am not sure about the coding efforts on this. maybe @dan has a clue since he’s working on the plugin?

@leader21 and @Andi-Tudor

Hi guys,
Andi already put forward a request for this in the Pimatic-Telegram thread. I think the general concept is not bad at all, and will make an attempt. ETA is a bit hard to give right now though.
I believe the technical solution to make this “Pimatic native” is a bit more complicated. High level I would need to do a number of things to achieve:

• Create a Pimatic device including:
  • user-definable instructions (e.g. “AllOff”)
  • polling mechanism to listen for authorized messages sent to the bot (Which user may sent which commands) (Rather poll than push / webhook considering security)
• Set variables accordingly
• See if any rule predicates are needed and implement accordingly

Probably not the answer you hoped for Andi, but I am listening

Cheers,

Dan

thx @dan!
sure, time is short these days don’t worry !!
maybe another @developer might join in and will have some ideas / codework for your plugin.

Hi @Andi,

This feature is up next for implementation, but may take some time however. Without having investigated feasibility, I would like to pitch the following as a starting point for discussion with the current users of the plugin.
When pitching in, remember the functionality we are discussing here is: “Allow Pimatic to receive commands from the Telegram app”

1. Expose a device “TelegramReceiver” with user configurable attributes:
   Allowed commands (Array / list)

• “name” - friendly name of command
  • “command” - would be a / command sent to the bot via the telegram interface
  • “variable” - the variable to set upon receiving the command
  • “value” - the value to set the variable to when receiving the command - optional / would default to yes/no
  • “enabled” - boolean allowing to disable certain commands temporarily or permanently

2. Extend the Plugin attributes:

• Add boolean attribute to the recipient list “Allow control”

This would allow the following hypothetical scenario:

1. TelegramReceiver polls at scheduled interval
   • User sends bot command e.g. /AllOff
   • TelegramReceiver checks if user is allowed and command is defined
   • TelegramReceiver sets variable $bot_command to value “yes”
   • User defined rule executes on state change / value of the variable

Dan

This would be great,
maybe you could also able to use a code for authentication.
So

• user sends a command
• bot ask for authentication-code
• user authenticates
• pimatic set the allowed-value to true

Mit freundlichen Grüßen
Chris

Hi @chris, good suggestion to consider. Would this already be covered by the “Allow control” setting? My thoughts are the ChatID is issued by Telegram and is not user configurable, preventing spoofing the ID. In a way this would be an implicit authentication. If we add your suggestion it would become Two-Factor-Authentication (“something you have + something you know”). It would be a higher level of security of course !

Dan

the chatID would be the first step i think.

a code authentication could be the next level.

and another could be the command authentication
(set different levels for commands)
–> e.g. so that not everybody could shutdown the device
–> e.g. so the shutdown command is code-locked

but lets begin in small steps…

Mit freundlichen Grüßen
Chris

All, below a first cut of the device interface, giving you some more insight into intended user functionality…

Hi @Dan . Very Nice Plugin. As a suggestion you should look on the rule action parser from the API. It is quite simple to use it and all commands are out of the box accessible like in a rule.

Also an predicate provider would prevent the detour over an variable.

For security reasons, an additional attribute on any devices for access control would be good.

I have written the plugin-xmpp to send messages to pimatic. Have a look on it for inspiration. I will switch immediately to telegram if it can receive messages.

And I will support you if needed.

The telegram bot has a lot of interest functions.

But not all commands should be passed to pimatic. Shell executes and pimatic with root privileges is still a problem.

@kosta said in Receives messages (Telegram):

Hi @Dan . Very Nice Plugin. As a suggestion you should look on the rule action parser from the API. It is quite simple to use it and all commands are out of the box accessible like in a rule.

Also an predicate provider would prevent the detour over an variable.

For security reasons, an additional attribute on any devices for access control would be good.

I have written the plugin-xmpp to send messages to pimatic. Have a look on it for inspiration. I will switch immediately to telegram if it can receive messages.

And I will support you if needed.

Hi @kosta thanks for your valuable input, and offer for support! I will certainly have a peek at the pimatic-xmpp code to see if similar design can be done (better stolen well than created poorly . The reason the variable - > value design came to mind was to allow for maximum user configurability by allowing the user to define rules in the backend.
However, I am open to suggestions of course

Hi All,

Just a quick update as there has been some radio silence: An early version with message receiving capability is now completed.
I will not implement setting variables and then using these as rule conditions. Instead the logic will be very similar to plugin-xmpp - @kosta thanks for letting me borrow from your code.
Implementation of additional security still needs to be done (asking for a secret before executing rules or actions). Hopefully there will be something to test around the weekend !

Dan

All,

I have just uploaded a version with the Message Receive feature implemented.
You can now send commands to Pimatic from Telegram, executing rules and actions on devices.
Please read the updated plugin documentation, or on npmjs.org (If the Pimatic site has not picked up the new readme yet) carefully before upgrading.
Old style rules are no longer supported and need to be upgraded to the new syntax if you have not already done so.

(I will not discuss questions relating to security on the forum for obvious reasons, but hey, its open source so…)

Enjoy,

Dan

Please hold off on upgrading, seems something went wrong with the NPM upload !

Too late and now there is a error with “token (”

Did you change something within plugin settings also?

@developer Murphy just paid me a visit, and my dev box is trashed.
The issue is as follows:

19:02:14.837 [pimatic] Starting pimatic version 0.9.37
19:02:17.492 [pimatic, ppm] 2.15.11
19:02:17.565 [pimatic] Loading plugin: “pimatic-telegram” (1.1.0)
19:02:17.601 [pimatic] Unexpected token {
19:02:17.645 [pimatic] Loading plugin: “pimatic-phone” (0.4.6)

This seems to occur during compilation of telegram.coffee. If anyone can take a peek to find the issue, it would be appreciated to not lose too much time.

I could reproduce on my prod (raspi), but the error was absent on my dev box. When copying the files from dev to prod (without NPM) the issue could be reproduced as well…

Thanks,

Dan

@Dan I think it is due to the telebot package which requires node v6. In version 1.08 you had telegram-bot-client instead.

See also
https://github.com/kosmodrey/telebot/issues/23

@mwittig you are corrrect. I have found the issue, javascript in two .js files is incompatible. I have created a workaround, but will do additional testing on my production box first before releasing a fix.

Meanwhile a manual removal of the package can be done as follows:
Reverting to the previous version for those who already upgraded:

-remove the TelegramReceiverDevice from config.json
-remove the admin attribute from any defined recipients in config.json
-rm -rf pimatic-telegram in your node_modules folder (<pimatic-app>/node_modules)
-npm install pimatic-telegram@1.0.8 in node_modules folder