talkypi

Do you need to be notified when Something Interesting™ happens on your headless Raspberry Pi? You've come to the right place. talkypi is a tiny ruby script that leverages the power of Prowl to send notifications to iOS (and other) devices.

You'll need a copy of Ruby on your Raspberry Pi and the Prowl app installed on your iOS device. Make sure you register your device with Prowl correctly in order to receive notifications on it.

Installing talkypi is easy:

$ gem install talkypi

Configure talkypi like so:

• Login to your Prowl account account, click the API Keys tab at the top right of the page, then click Generate Key under the Generate a new API key section (you may wish to give the new key a memorable name for future reference)
• Copy the new API key
• Create a .talkypi file in your home directory and paste the API key into it

Use talkypi from the command-line:

$ talkypi "event title" "longer description"

The notification will be delivered to any devices you've registered with Prowl.

You can call talkypi from shell scripts or cron jobs. Let your imagination run wild!

Using a simple cron job you can generate a notification whenever your Raspberry Pi starts up (after a power loss or manual/automatic reboot):

Find out where talkypi was installed:

$ which talkypi
/usr/local/opt/ruby/bin/talkypi

Open your crontab file for editing:

$ crontab -e

Enter the following line, replacing the path to talkypi with the output from the which command above:

@reboot sleep 10; /usr/local/opt/ruby/bin/talkypi "system event" "the system powered up successfully"

The sleep command isn't strictly necessary, but you may find that without it notifications don't work — it gives your system time to bring up the network interfaces before attempting to send the notification.

talkypi makes use of the following libraries:

• Prowl Ruby wrapper by August Lilleaas

talkypi is provided under the terms of the MIT License.

Email me at marc.ransome@fidgetbox.co.uk or create an issue.