Onion Omega with PHP & PushBullet

Pushbullet is tool for receiving & sending messages, files etc… across platforms.

For example you can send a message aka “note” via your Onion Omega and then the note appears on all your connected devices, eg on your phone, iPad and even in your web browser. It’s a bridge between them all!

Possible Uses

What you could do with this is really up to you, here are a couple of ideas:

1. Someone at the door? Use a PIR sensor hooked up to the Onion Omega and when triggered you’ll receive a notification on your devices
2. The alarm has gone off, alerts are now everywhere, even if you’re abroad
3. Hook it up to IFTTT and create your own custom recipes
4. Oh and someone at the door again? Push a file, which just so happens is a jpg image from a connected USB Webcam to all the devices and unlock the door via a message back or a custom app in the Onion Omega dashboard

This simple example is using PHP, but you can easily do the same with any other programming language as it’s just a POST request.

Prerequisites

1. You’ll need a pushbullet account (which is free) and the app installed on one or more devices
2. And you’ll need a pushbullet API key, you can get this by going to https://www.pushbullet.com/#settings/account, under “Access Tokens” press “Create Access Token”. Copy this key, you’ll need it shortly.

Installing PHP & PHP cURL

The process of installing PHP on your Onion Omega is covered in this tutorial:

PHP-GPIO-Example

However to be able to send curl requests, you’ll need one additional library called “php5-mod-curl”. You can install this by running these commands in your Onion Omega console:

opkg update
opkg install php5-mod-curl

Now restart uhttpd by running:

/etc/init.d/uhttpd restart

Now go to your php folder and create a new file:

cd /www/php
nano pushbullet.php

Then paste in the code below, changing your auth token you got from step 1:

<?php
$authToken = "your auth token here!!!";

$curl = curl_init('https://api.pushbullet.com/v2/pushes');
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POST, true);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, ["Authorization: Bearer $authToken"]);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, [
		"type" => "note", 
		"title" => "Pushbullet Notification", 
		"body" => "Howdy, this is a message sent from my from My Onion Omega!"]
		);

$response = curl_exec($curl);
echo "<pre>";
print_r($response);
echo "</pre>";

Save the file by pressing “Ctrl+X”, pressing “y” and then “Enter”

Now open your web browser and go to http://omega-ABCD.local/php/pushbullet.php (chaging the url to your Onion Omega of course :) )

Ta da!!

Where to go from here?

The world is your oyster. How about trying one of the dedicated PHP libraries for Pushbullet to make development faster?

1. https://github.com/ivkos/Pushbullet-for-PHP
2. https://github.com/joetannenbaum/phpushbullet