onlineChecker

This script pings a device on your network and reports whether it is online or not to Domoticz by setting a virtual switch. In a wider context this can then be used to detect the presence of someone or some activity in your house (e.g. am I home, is the laptop or tv on, etc.)

Installation

• Navigate to your Domoticz' scripts folder (mine's ~/domoticz/scripts/) and clone this repository into that directory: git clone https://github.com/jorijnsmit/onlineChecker.git

• onlineChecker depends on the requests library: pip install requests

• You might also need to install configparser: pip install configparser

• Copy or rename config.template.ini to config.ini and edit the file so that it contains your Domoticz and device details.

You can now run the script!

If you want to have multiple config files, you can specify which one to load by giving its filename as an argument in the command-line: python online_checker.py config2.ini

Run as a systemd service

To help manage when and how the script runs, you can install it as a systemd service. This will make it very easy to always run in the background, restart automatically, run on startup, log properly etc. You can learn more about systemd here.

A simple .service file to manage this script goes into /etc/systemd/system/ and could look like this:

[Unit]
Description=onlineChecker

[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=/usr/bin/python3 -u online_checker.py
WorkingDirectory=/home/jorijnsmit/domoticz/scripts/onlineChecker
User=jorijnsmit
Restart=always

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Running python unbuffered (-u) makes sure the print messages don't get buffered but go straight to the console/log.

Once that file is in place you can enable/disable, start/stop etc. it using systemctl commands.

That's all!

Credits

All credits go to "Chopper_Rob" for the core logic of this script, as I found it published on https://www.domoticz.com/wiki/Presence_detection (original url is unfortunately offline).