Sunday 12 October 2014

Switching appliances ON and OFF remotely by e-mail with the Raspberry Pi and Mains Switch Widget #1

Having designed the Mains Switch Widget, my next challenge was to turn appliances ON and OFF from outside the house. I investigated Twitter and texts as a means of doing this but finally settled on using e-mails to control the appliances. This multi part post outlines the various steps along the way.

First of all I set up a gmail account just for the house. As we live in number 11, The Groves, the e-mail address I chose was elevengroves@gmail.com.

IMAP seems to be a good way to look at and analyse received e-mail. I found the  post here http://www.voidynullness.net/blog/2013/07/25/gmail-email-with-python-via-imap/ very useful.

I also wanted to send a confirmation e-mail back to verify that the command has been actioned. The posts here were very useful in working out the best way to do this.

http://www.raspberrypi-spy.co.uk/2012/05/send-text-and-html-email-using-python/

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10147455/trying-to-send-email-gmail-as-mail-provider-using-python

Using the information in these posts and with a working knowledge of Python I have managed to get a system working as follows.

1.     Networked Raspberry Pi at my house, connected to a mains Switch Widget with a lamp plugged into it and switched ON.

2.     Program recognises commands 'APP1ON' and 'APP1OFF' when sent in the subject field to e-mail addresss elevengroves@gmail.com

3.    Confirmation e-mail sent back to say that command has been actioned.

 I plan to publish the debugged code for this on the next part of this post. In the meantime the system is on trial.

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