Being the early rising dutiful husband that I am I often greet Emma with a cup of tea in the morning. On normal days I’ll have a quick look at what time she set the alarm for and I’ll make tea and take it upstairs just in time to switch off her alarm and then we settle in with tea to do the Guardian crossword.
This is fine except for weekends. She doesn’t set an alarm on weekends. So I’d always in the past try and pick a reasonable time and wander up. This seldom worked out. She’d either be fast asleep or she’d come downstairs before I made tea. This situation could not persist.
A long long time ago Amazon released these really quite cool things called “Amazon Dash Buttons” where you would hook them up to your WiFi and when you press the Dash Button it would contact the Amazon Mothership and order you another whatever, box of teabags, toilet roll, dishwasher tablets – whatever it was set up for.
So I bought one on eBay.
A lot of the info on the web talked about them having a soldered in flat battery which was going to be a pain. After taking my Dremel to the button I discovered that the version I had was filled with a AAA battery. So I replaced the battery and got to configuring my firewall so that the MAC address of the Dash Button couldn’t get outside my network since it seems Amazon are being a bunch of dicks about this sort of thing and remotely bricking any devices that contact the server.
After much hacking involving playing some audio into the Dash Button, performing a factory reset, and then using a Python script to configure the button for my IOT network I had the beginnings of a solution. I have a Raspberry Pi that was already doing a few things and now it also sits and listens for an ARP packet from the MAC address of the Dash Button. When it receives the ARP it will then call a Telegram script that I wrote which will message my phone with a “Bring Tea” message.
So far so good – but there’s no ACK. I could go to the bottom of the stairs and shout up “OK, tea incoming” but that would just wake everyone else up. So I released the hounds…well hound.
Violet, our pet Whippet loves getting in bed with us when we’re doing the crossword. So the sequence of events is now:
Emma wakes up.
Presses the tea button.
I open the door for Violet and she runs upstairs and gets in bed with Emma
I make tea and take it upstairs.
We complete the crossword and the nine-letter anagram.
