About

This project provides a simple Telegram bot that waits for user commands and at the same time listens to incoming messages from a MQTT broker.

The concrete application provided by this project allows the users to send "snap" commands to a ESP32-Cam device and send the captured snapshots back to the user via telegram.

Usage

The dependencies of this project are listed in the requirements.txt file. Before using this bot, the required dependencies need to be installed.

Configuration

The bot requires some configuration before it can be used. This project provides an example configuration file named application_configuration.example.yaml which serves a starting up point for the configuration. Copy this file into another one and name it application.configuration.yaml.

The second step is to generate a "token" for the bot, and once the token is available, set it in the token field of the configuration file.

Finally, configure the MQTT broker and topics; these values should match the values configured for the device running the esp32cam_snap code. It's worth mentioning that if the bot is running on the same host than the MQTT broker, then the preferred IP address to use is the 127.0.0.1.

Execute

Run the bot by executing the following command:

  python esp32cam_snapbot.py

Security

For security reasons, the "snap" commands are processed for allowed users only. The allowed users must be listed in the allowed_users setting in the configuration file, such list requires the users' Telegram numeric user ID; there are many ways to retrieve this ID, one of them is to ask the user to send the "/start" command to the running instance of the bot, then the bot will reply the message Hola <numeric_user_id>. Once the allowed_users are configured, then the bot needs to be restarted.