Published: Aug 3, 2019 by

As I mentioned before one of the primary reasons for starting this project was to let my wife and I start the Roomba when we are not at home. One device that most of us take everywhere is our phone. An easy way to to send information from your phone without a custom app, stack and hassle is SMS. While it’s easy to broadcast receiving that message can take a little work.

Twilio

Luckily monitoring a number for messages is pretty much a solved problem. Twilio offers an easy way to setup number with an attached webhook for receiving and sending messages. They also have a nice Python tutorialthat had me up and running in about 10 minutes. Since I was already using the Pi Zero to send commands to the Roomba setting up a script to watch for an SMS message and pass on the new command was simple enough.

import busio  
import board  
import adafruitrfm9x  
from digitalio import DigitalInOut  
from flask import Flask, request  
from twilio.twiml.messagingresponse import MessagingResponseCS = DigitalInOut(board.CE1)  

RESET = DigitalInOut(board.D25)  
spi = busio.SPI(board.SCK, MOSI=board.MOSI, MISO=board.MISO)  
rfm9x = adafruitrfm9x.RFM9x(spi, CS, RESET, 433.0)  
rfm9x.txpower = 23app = Flask(name)  
  
@app.route("/sms", methods=["GET", "POST"])  
def smsstartroomba():  
  """  
  When a message is received determine which  
  signal to send the Roomba and reply  
  to the sender.  
  """** *txt = request.values.get("Body").lower() if txt == "start":  
  msg = "Starting the Roomba."  
  cmd = bytes("1", "ascii")  
  elif txt == "halt":  
  msg = "Stopping the Roomba."  
  cmd = bytes("0", "ascii")  
  elif txt == "dock":  
  msg = "Roomba beginning to dock."  
  cmd = bytes("2", "ascii")  
  else:  
  msg = "Unknown command. Continuing."  
  cmd = None if cmd:  
  rfm9x.send(cmd) resp = MessagingResponse()  
  resp.message(msg) return str(resp)  
  
if name == "main":  
 app.run(debug=False)

And with that the same board I had used to test sending messages in response to button clicks can now receive SMS payloads and translate that into a command that the Feather will use to start, stop or dock the Roomba.

Next Steps

With all the pieces assembled and working the last thing to do for version 1 was setup some redundancy, restart everything and make sure it all worked as expected without my intervention.