telegram-doorbell

Very basic POC/MVP to capture an image from a Ubiquiti Doorbell (or any other Ubiquiti camera, or any other .jpg file that can be reached via http) and send it as a message in a Telegram bot.

Prerequisites:

1. Make sure the .jpg is reachable from the same network. On a Ubiquiti camera see here: https://community.ui.com/questions/URL-to-take-a-camera-image/fe0c7645-97d9-44d5-a0a1-cabc5a14ebff
2. Get a Telegram Bot token: https://core.telegram.org/bots#botfather
3. Install the Universal Arduino Telegram Bot library: https://github.com/witnessmenow/Universal-Arduino-Telegram-Bot

Then modify the code as follows (chose the ESP32 version for ESP32 or the base version for the ESP8266):

1. Fill in your details (Wifi Credentials and Telegram Bot token)
2. Fill in the full path to the image snapshot on your camera (see line 39)
3. As a test this will talk to anyone who tries to communicate with the bot. To lock it down just make sure it only interacts with your chat_id

Then upload the sketch to your board and open the Serial Terminal to see what's happening

Then connect to the Telegram Bot and send /start Then each subsequent message you send to the bot will trigger it to pull an image and send it

Important Notes: On an ESP8266 board this is very slow. On an ESP32 you can expect the full roundtrip transaction to take less than a minute. The memory available is quite small so the .jpg file cannot be too large. It takes a bit over 10 seconds to pull a ~256k file from the camera and then it takes nearly 5 minutes to push it to Telegram (on ESP8266) much faster on ESP32.

I'm just an untrained hack at writing code, so I'm sure there is a better way and happy to take advice on how to speed this up.

Here is an example with time stamps on ESP8266 (so you can see how slow it is) of all the steps as they are output to the Serial Terminal:

19:45:06.009 -> [TELEGRAM] Received Message
19:45:06.009 -> [TELEGRAM] Message from user: **redacted**
19:45:06.009 -> [TELEGRAM] Message text: /start
19:45:06.009 -> [TELEGRAM] Sending confirmation message...
19:45:06.009 -> [FILE] Local filename: snap.jpeg
19:45:06.009 -> [HTTP] begin...
19:45:06.009 -> [HTTP] Destination URL: **redacted**
19:45:06.009 -> [HTTP] GET...
19:45:06.009 -> [HTTP] GET... code: 200
19:45:06.009 -> [FILE] open file for writing...[FILE] size is: 256657
19:45:17.008 -> [HTTP] connection closed or file end.
19:45:17.008 -> [FILE] closing file
19:45:23.208 -> [TELEGRAM] Sending image: snap.jpeg....
19:49:17.818 -> [TELEGRAM] Image was successfully sent.