mqtt-doorbell 0.1.1

A simple Linux-based doorbell, which plays the mp3 bell ringtone upon receiving an MQTT message.

Simple MQTT Door Bell

A simple Linux-based doorbell, which plays the mp3 bell ringtone upon receiving a MQTT message.

The main idea is to create a system service, which can play an audio file upon receiving the message from the MQTT message broker. This may be useful for configuring sound notifications or alarms in the Home Assistant automations.

Supported platforms

This solution has been tested on Ubuntu 22.04, but most likely will work on other Linux distros, with minor changes.

Prerequisites

1. Mosquitto MQTT message broker installed and accessible from the deployment machine.

2. MP3 player utility, which can play mp3 files from the command line, installed on the host machine. I used mpg123 but other options should work as well.

3. Python verison >= 3.10

Installation

First please ensure all pre-requisites are in place. Testing your MP3 player from the command line on the host where you plan to deploy this tool is the first step - you need to ensure that mp3 files are played as expected.

For example, here is the command for the mpg123 utility:

$ mpg123 -qf32768 -adefault:CARD=Speaker /path/to/ringtone.mp3

In this command, the number after the -qf option represents the volume, which can range from -32767 to 32768.

Second, we need to create a user profile, which will run the mqtt-doorbell service:

$ useradd -M doorbell
$ usermod -L doorbell
$ groupadd doorbell
$ usermod -a -G doorbell,audio doorbell 

Next, clone this repo to some folder on your disk:

$ git clone https://github.com/abratchik/mqtt-doorbell

Configuration