I have recently made a significant overhaul to how I handle reading the temperature of my tea water and reporting it reaching the optimal temperature for sencha green 🍵!
First, on the Arduino, I refactored it to utilize not a RESTful endpoint but MQTT. The reason for this is that it’s fairly standardized and fast. Also, it’s one less thing I have to maintain. Next, I built, using Python, an adapter to a locally hosted Ntfy instance on an Raspberry PI 4. Finally, I installed the app on my mobile, connecting it to my locally hosted instance. Ntfy was chosen over Gotify because it has both Android and iOS support. Also, there’s as fairly useful desktop client.
What I’ve done by this is moving everything in-house and made them fairly generic enough for any future changes. One of the problems with SMS, which was the previous approach to messaging, is the cost and reliability. Sometimes, depending on network issues, I did not receive the message in time. Wouldn’t this have the same problems with an in-house netowrk? Depends on the network. Mine just happens to be reliable enough. Next, it costs money to send SMS. Finally, I don’t need external to my network access.
In the future, I might reimplement an SMS system. If so, all I’d have to do is update the adapter between MQTT and the SMS system.