Send Raspberry Pi and Arduino notification messages to your desktop
You've Been Notified
© Lead Image © donatas1205, 123RF.com
If you use sensors with a Raspberry Pi or Arduino in your home network, you may want to get desktop notifications on your Linux PC whenever some interesting event is detected. You can send messages via SSH or through simple TCP connections and display them with notify-send.
There are some great libraries and techniques that let you pass sensor data from microcontrollers to centralized data servers and IoT dashboards. If you spend a lot of time on your laptop or behind a Linux desktop PCs, there are also some simple options that you can use to push notifications from Raspberry Pis or Arduino modules to the Linux desktop. Two techniques that I like to use are
- Running a remote command via an SSH login
- Sending a message to a small TCP socket server script on my laptop (Figure 1)
Both of these approaches have their pros and cons. For a Raspberry Pi or a similar machine running a full Linux system, it's a simple task to log in to your desktop via ssh and execute some notification command. Unfortunately, however, most Arduino modules don't support SSH. Also, depending on what you're doing on your local machine, you may not want to let external devices log in via SSH.
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